F1 Manager 22 Review

Two of the games I like forward to each year are the Football Manager and Formula 1 simulation games, so you can probably imagine the internal hype I went through when F1 Manager 22 was announced. I’ve been playing the game for a few days and now is the time for my verdict. It’s the first official Formula 1 management game since the year 2000 (22 years!), so does game take the chequered flag for victory, or does it get a puncture and stumble its way across the finish line?

Developed and Published by Frontier Developments, F1 Manager in a word is…FANTASTIC! Yes, right off the bat I’m telling you this game is fantastic. For its first instalment it genuinely has no right being this good – sure it’s not perfect, but what game is these days?

F1 Manager could well be a marmite game though: if you’re the type of person who likes to just plug in and play, like FIFA, then you may not enjoy it so much, but if you love games like Football Manager, then you’ll more than likely love it, due to the amount of depth on offer here.

You start of course by choosing which of the 10 current Formula One teams you want manage. Each team has its own targets and long term objectives, so if you want to start at the front of the grid and manage Ferrari trying to win their first drivers championship since 2007, you can, and for any of you that watch real life F1, I’m sure you’ll think you’ll be able to do a better job than your real life counter parts… If you like pain and want to work your way up the grid, then Williams will be the challenge for you. Their long term objective after 5 seasons is to be a points contender, so there’s no pressure for instant success, unlike McLaren , who despite having the 8^th fastest car, want to finish 5^th in the constructors table, which I can assure you, after doing 11 out of the 22 races so far is no easy task! F1 Manager also gives you 50 save files, so if you have all the time in the world and want to manage all 10 teams on separate files, then 1) I’m jealous and 2) You can.

A game with such depth as F1 Manager is always going to struggle when it comes to accessibility options, there are some of course, but none to make the game any easier. There is however a helpful tutorial, which can be turned off and on at any time. The individual tutorial parts can also be re-visited at any time as well if you need a reminder.

One thing I was a bit worried about with F1 Manager was how the game would play with a controller. Historically management & strategy type games have always been best played with a mouse and keyboard, whether you played games like Football Manager or Command & Conquer. The feel was never right with a controller, and I was always put off playing them on a console. F1 Manager breaks the mould here though as playing with a controller is seamless. Again it’s not perfect, and having watched people on streaming sites play the game, the mouse & keyboard combo is still looks a tad bit easier, but this is as good as it gets with a controller, which is great news for me personally as I won’t have to buy it for my laptop and play it on there!

I’ve mentioned the depth a few times so here is an overview of what you can expect to see on the main menu hub.

Home – A summary of a few other tabs, where you can see your current driver line up, the championship standings, the next race and upcoming events on your calendar.

Inbox – Self-explanatory really, this is where you emails come through, Look out for emails from your board or potential regulation changes!

Calendar – A month by month overview of what is going on in your Formula One world, so if you see you have tracks like Spa and Monza coming up, you can focus on your top speed

Circuits – An overview of every track on the calendar, which will include its records and potential weather

 Race – An overview of the next race

Cars – Here you can manage the build of your cars and check on your powertrain units. This is also where you can design, manufacture and research parts for your car

Drivers – As you van probably guess, this is where you can manage your drivers, renew their contracts, compare their stats against other drivers if you have them scouted. You can also check out their stats from the last 5 seasons. This is also where you go to start scouting drivers, so if you’re McLaren and you’re interested in the services Oscar Piastri, with the view of replacing Daniel Ricciardo, then this is the place to go

Staff – Again, self-explanatory, but this is where you go to view your current staff, including your Technical Chief, Head of Aerodynamics and Race Engineers and like the drivers’ tab, theirs an option to scout of members of staff if you don’t think yours are up to the task. You can also see how good your pit crew are as well, you can have them focus on a specific area if you wish, so if they’re weak at changing tyres then you can have them train on that.

Facilities – A big area this a one of the most expensive, but probably the most vital if you want to lead your team to glory, you can improve your car development, staff and operational facilities.

Board – This tab gives you an idea of how happy the board is of your management. You can even break it down on a race-by-race basis. The rules and regulations are here as well so you can see what’s current and what could be implemented in the following season.

Finances – Can you guess what this is? Yup this is the tab that tells you how rich (or poor) you are. Again, there’s a breakdown so you can investigate your incomings and outgoings as well as keeping your eye on the budget cap for the current season.

Standings – The last tab, Huzzah! Another self-explanatory tab, this is the place to be if you want a more detailed look and the driver and constructor standings and look at individual driver and team stats, like how many pole positions, podiums and fastest laps they have.

See, all that and neither one of your drivers have turned a wheel in anger!

So then, what happens when you reach the race weekend? Well for starters you need to review your race targets by the sponsors to see how to extract extra money out of them. You can also set extra targets for yourself: the bolder you go, the more bonus pay out you’ll get from them which will be super important as your drivers also have performance bonuses, which has the potential to cripple your team. Let’s say you’ve picked Mercedes, you’ve given Lewis Hamilton a new contract with a win bonus of two million, with 22 races on the calendar that’s potentially 44 million you’re handing out in bonuses alone!

This is where you can speed up your playtime a bit. You have the option of being able to sim through the practice sessions and qualifying as well, although I really don’t recommend this. Practice sessions are your friend as you try to find the optimal setup for your drivers, each will have their own preference, so one glove won’t fit all here! There are no sprint races in F1 Manager 22 so you won’t need to worry about that, which is a shame, but as it is Frontiers first attempt I’ll let them have a pass for that one.

After you’ve navigated your way through practice and qualifying its time for race day! Once again the detail here is immense, you can choose your strategies on how much you want you drivers to push, maybe you want to be aggressive and go for a 2 stop, burning the tyres and fuel for maximum pace, or maybe you go more conservative and elect for a one stop strategy, looking after the tyres and hope to hold on to track position.

Once the race has started there is so much to micromanage; the depth here is unreal, though I won’t go into too much detail as I’ll be here all day and the kids will be wanting their dinner soon. You can again change how much you want to push their tyres, fuel, and DRS usage. It’s very easy to get stuck in a DRS train so being able to tell your drivers to maximum push after overtaking someone can clear you of a potential race long battle. There are other little details like telling your drivers to ‘avoid kerbs’ and ‘drive in clean air’, if you need to cool your car or look after your tyres. There is also real-life audio from the drivers and their engineers which really does cement F1 Manager as the best ever Formula 1 management game.

Each race is the full distance which you can’t change or sim, however there are different speeds you can watch the race. So, if you want to sit through 78 laps of Monaco at normal speed and micromanage every lap you can, but there is also x2,4,8 & x16 speed, so if you get to an uneventful part of the race and want to speed things up you can. Personally, it took me over an hour to manage Baku, as I was constantly having to change the way my drivers approached each lap by either attacking or defending. One race, though I can’t for the life of me remember which one it was, only took about 20 minutes.

Whilst on the higher speeds you go to an ariel view and the cars become spots on the track radar. If you’re worried about missing the action then don’t worry; if your driver performs an overtake or makes a mistake the game will offer you the chance to be able to watch a replay back of it. The game will also slow down to normal speed for important things, so you don’t have to worry about potentially messing up a safety car period or miss a pitstop if one of your drivers sustains damage and needs to pit.

Your career can last for as long as you want it to (or until you get fired). As well as the current Formula 1 drivers, we have the fully licensed drivers from Formula 2 & 3! It’s been confirmed that drivers can retire, so once the older guys in the paddock like Alonso and Vettel call time on their careers, you have a wealth of drivers to choose from, it’s also been confirmed that we will see randomly generated ‘regen’ drivers in the game.

There are many ways to approach how you want to run your team from the drivers side, as all drivers can improve, but there are limits on how much they can improve. For example, with being one of the older more experienced drivers on the grid, Lewis Hamilton has low growth potential and will likely stay at his 90 overall rating, but if you hire drivers like the previously mentioned Piastri or Pourchaire, they both have high potential for growth, so even though they start around the 78 rating mark, they could easily be as good if not better than the likes of Hamilton or Verstappen.

Despite falling in love with F1 Manager from day one, it does have a few flaws. The main one for me is not being able to switch teams at any point in your save, and there is also no option to create your own team. I’m sure both features will come at some point in the future, either through an update or on next years game if they plan to make this an annual release. Another small bug bear is if you poach a driver from another team before the first race, then the driver you poached will be replaced by the driver you released, which does make sense as the driver you released will be the highest rated free agent, but it would’ve been nice to see teams perhaps sign a driver from the F2 or F3 ranks. The only other thing that bothered me was some of the crashes were a bit weird, which can sometimes break the immersion and on some tracks there can be a lot of repetition of incidents, the commentary can also be over dramatic if a driver runs wide but doesn’t seem to of lost any time.

Conclusion

You can tell a lot of time and effort has gone into making F1 Manager to be as polished and as detailed as it is, I genuinely wasn’t expecting this much detail and depth as a first entry into the series. F1 Manager can easily be labelled as the best F1 Management game ever and I hope all fans of management and strategy games pick this up and enjoy it as much as I am!