Must know
What is it? A licensed F1 management sim from the Elite developers.
Issued August 30, 2022
Expect to pay $55 / £45
Developer Border developments
Publisher Border developments
Judged by Core i7 9700K, RTX 2080 TI, 16GB RAM
Multiplayer? no
Clutch Official site (opens in new tab)
If last season in Formula 1 was all about driving, this year it’s about management. Gone are the days when Lewis and Max fought bitterly for every inch of asphalt, sending each other to drain areas and exchanging the least sincere handshakes in the pre-stage room on this side of a Premier League dugout. Instead of a historic, headline-grabbing duel on the track, 2022 has given us a season of mind-boggling managerial incompetence. Bad news for everyone except Max Verstappen and Frontier Developments.
Because when you see the accelerator come off on Leclerc’s Ferrari as he is five laps away from victory in Austria, or when you find yourself yelling at Mercedes’ tire strategy in a safety car-laden Zandvoort, your natural inclination is to think that you can do better. “Stay out of it, fools!” You don’t tell anyone. “Let them blink first!”
This is the chance to find out how our kind of managerial incompetence compares to the rest of the network. In its debut licensed F1 management sim, Frontier Developments conveys both the palm-soaked reactivity of a Sunday in sport, and the frenetic development race that takes place between them.
As the team boss, you are in charge of everything from signing the drivers that will be in your car to designing and manufacturing the parts for that car. Pit crews spring into action on race day when you say so, and even the amount of money sponsors pay you depends on the promises you make to them for each race weekend. Oddly enough, you are even involved in the mechanical settings of each car. You wanton megalomaniac.
That makes for a nice cadence. Slow, therapeutic progress through email inboxes and front wing design menus, then race day bursts of adrenaline as you are thrust into a 3D engine showing the action on the track. Kind of like Football Manager’s menus that correspond to engine transitions, or Civ’s tough peacetime transitioning into terrifying wartime strategies. Your big plans are made in the wind tunnel, in negotiations about driver contracts and balance sheets. But it’s the asphalt where you see them blossom. And it’s that tick-tack of progress that makes you bargain with yourself in the middle of the night: just one more match. I need to see where this new subfloor puts me on the grid.
Mercedes is the beneficiary of a new totally unproven and unqualified team boss in my playthrough. Toto Wolff? Pfft. He has just seven constructors’ titles and a successful career as an investment banker to his name. On his ass. Phil Iwaniuk is now in charge of the mouse clicks, and he is turning this sinking ship over.
I’m pushing aero package updates for the entire car: chassis, front and rear wings, floor, sidepods and new suspension designs. At great expense, I rush the design and manufacture of all these components, sacrificing the balance and XP gain to fit new parts to the car and bridge the performance gap with Red Bull and Ferrari as quickly as possible. After all, if Lewis Hamilton is in an F1 car right now and can’t win, that’s on the car.
Such an aggressive upgrade strategy is a luxury only offered to the top three teams. Further down the midfield, budgets are just too tight to waste unnecessary money on rushed upgrades. And when the parts come in, they’re more likely to deliver less performance gains because they’re designed and built in lower-quality facilities. In addition to that misery, the sponsor payouts are also much smaller because the cars are buzzing off-camera most of the time, fighting for P16. So if you’re wondering why Williams and Haas don’t just make a better car in real life, play a little bit of F1 Manager 2022.
The satisfaction of righting an alleged flaw in the real sport — a favorite driver who can’t win, rampant organizational incompetence that costs a team a one-two weekend after weekend — only comes when the simulation feels convincing enough. And that’s something F1 Manager does very well, combining a well-prepared difficulty level and clever presentation elements such as real team radio voice clips. The bubble would burst if the teams and drivers felt there were lines of code, or if changing the grid order was too easy. They don’t, and they don’t.
There’s a lot of micromanagement involved: driver pace, fuel economy, ERS deployment and pit strategy are all in your hands.
Despite all my rushed aero upgrades for the Silver Arrows, it’s more than half a season before we can even think about winning a race or taking pole at pure speed. In the meantime, our only hope is weather and safety cars.
However, it is not a passive experience, overseeing a race. There’s a lot of micromanagement involved: driver pace, fuel economy, ERS deployment and pit strategy are all in your hands. When you do all these things manually, corner to corner, it feels like you’re driving the car yourself. You can forcefully arm your drivers through overtaking with these controls, but you can’t brutally force a Williams onto the podium with only sensible use of fuel and ERS. For the real standout results you need a bit of luck from the aforementioned wet weather and crashes.
And it’s here, in the more unpredictable dimensions of the sport, where F1 Manager 2022 emerges as an inexperienced rookie rather than a cunning old competitor. Crashes, safety cars and sudden downpours should be the most spectacular and pivotal moments of an F1 manager’s season, with the chance that decisive strategic decisions take precedence over outright performance.
Unfortunately, crashes aren’t really detailed – cars just stop on the track or run into the gravel. The visual spectacle just isn’t there yet. And as wet weather rolls in and soaks the track at a believable speed, the AI tends to be a bit too superstitious to produce interesting scenarios as a result. The same goes for safety car and VSC scenarios. Not yet in my time with the game has a driver chosen to make an extra unscheduled pit stop to get on fresh soft connections, as we saw recently with Red Bull at Zandvoort – or, more accurately, with Red Bull at Abu Dhabi last year.
You can make up for a bit in these scenarios, and there’s definitely a sense of thrill and adrenaline when they happen. But after a while it becomes clear that you feel pumped up because of what you expect could happen, rather than what generally goes. There are very few instances of renegade or reactive pit stops, and that in turn doesn’t force you to make many reactive decisions.
Where the AI really lets this effort down, however, is in the cockpit. It’s hard to imagine watching seven-time champion Lewis Hamilton chasing Valtteri Bottas for 40 laps in Monaco, whatever you tell him to do with the tyres, fuel and ERS. And it’s hard to forgive the time lost passing a back marker who doesn’t seem willing or able to get out of the way. George Russell once lost 10 seconds to Latifi. There is no smart pit strategy to counter that.
It’s hard to imagine watching seven-time champion Lewis Hamilton chasing Valtteri Bottas for 40 laps in Monaco.
In the next installment, which is sure to come, AI behavior should be a focus for Frontier. Right now, it’s responsible for breaking the illusion just a little too often. But even with a grid full of suckers, F1 Manager 2022 is consistently producing exciting races, and it seems my investment in rebuilding my Mercedes is deepening every hour I spend with it.
Lewis takes his first win of the season at Spa, quite late, and George Russell took the first pinnacle of his career in a bizarrely rainy race in Miami. But two seasons in and over $50 million spent on upgrades, Red Bull still has the downright pace advantage. That’s how I would like it to be. You don’t want to get the scientific victory in Civ until you reach the classic era.
Frontier can be proud of its well-reviewed base release in what is sure to be a long-running series. In a perfect world, we’d see cars shatter into carbon fiber shards when they crashed, and we’d recognize the Verstappens and Ricciardos by their driving style, not just their livery. As it is, the foundations are all in place, ready to build upon.
A foundation that ironically has been around for a few years. This game is indebted to Playsport Games’ 2017 Motorsport Manager, who provided an extremely comprehensive blueprint for how modern racing management sims should play. A blueprint that Frontier has observed almost down to the millimeter, right down to the way you refine car setups during free practice sessions. However, the license and the detailed race visuals do enough to set this new game apart, and F1 Manager 2022 wields its shiny official license in all the right areas, building a compelling ecosystem that evolves from season to season, making sure you perfect car keeps chasing even longer than Toto has.
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