Sports management games fulfill a specific niche in the landscape that can be very satisfying to experience if done right. Football Manager has been the gold standard for sports management titles for years now, with smaller titles like F1 Manager lagging behind. The changes made with 2024’s iteration of F1 Manager may just change the course of the trailing series, helping it punch above its weight. A number of new features have been added this year that go beyond the typical annual update. Here are the 15 things you need to know before you buy F1 Manager 2024.
Create A Team Mode Makes Its Debut
By far the most requested feature in the F1 Manager series has been the ability to create your own team from the ground up. F1 Manager 2024 finally brings the Create A Team mode, complete with suit customization, custom origin story, and full-range team recruitment from F2 and F3. The livery editor is a much-anticipated feature the series has lacked, so its introduction in the create-a-team mode is a double win for fans.
New Mentality System Adds More Depth to Management
One of the big criticisms thrown at F1 Manager is its shallow management features compared to similar games like the Football Manager series. Well, F1 Manager 2024 aims to remedy that a bit with the new Mentality system. Mentality tracks the motivational status of individual drivers and staff, giving you control over how to increase team morale. For example, favoring certain racers at the expense of others will result in disillusionment, but may result in a win if the star racer you focused so much on wins it all on the weekend. Micromanaging the morale of the team seems like a cool way to add more agency to your managerial duties.
Mechanical Failure System Introduced for the First Time
It’s hard to believe that a Formula 1 sim such as F1 Manager never had vehicle breakdowns before, but it’s true. The 2024 iteration of F1 Manager introduces mechanical failures for the very first time. Races previously tended to get predictable in past games, so mechanical failures will throw a nice wrench in the flow. We’ll see how fun this new sim element is in practice and whether or not the AI will be frustrating with the frequency of mechanical breakdowns; it’d be really nice if there is a way to tune breakdown frequency yourself, but maybe it’ll be decided via difficulty options.
New Dynamic Overhead Helicam
Didn’t like the restricted cameras from past F1 Manager games? Well, F1 Manager 2024 finally offers another viewing option. A new birdseye overhead Helicam allows wide panning angles that follow large swaths of the race track to better see the playing field. While the far zoomed-out map with little dots representing race cars was nice for strategic planning in past games, having a dedicated helicam actually showing the car detail with a beautiful overhead view is very needed. Many players didn’t like how the default race cam shifted between cockpit and overhead sporadically in previous games, so this new camera is a welcome addition.
Base Game Price Is Half That of New Triple-A Games
F1 Manager 2024 releases at a modest price point of £29.99 / $34.99 / €34.99. Frontier Developments publishes and develops these games at a much lower operating cost than triple-A companies like EA. One of the reasons F1 Manager isn’t as feature-rich and graphically intensive as Football Manager is because it’s made by a smaller team and because they crank these games out yearly. Still, with all the new features added onto this year’s edition of F1 Manager, the price being half as much as a majority of new game releases is a win-win.
Uses The Official Drivers and Circuits From the Real Life 2024 Season
Despite its smaller studio size, Frontier Developments has the license to the official F1 FIA Formula One World Championship, the FIA Formula 2 Championship, and the FIA Formula 3 Championship. Like other licensed sports games, F1 Manager includes a complete real-life roster of competitors that you’ll get to race with and compete against. In addition to the drivers, every race track from the official 2024 F1 season is included here, built with track marbling and real-world scans.
F1 Games Are Yearly Releases, so Don’t Expect A Complete Overhaul
As previously mentioned, the F1 Manager series gets a new entry every year. Past F1 Manager games received a small scattering of new updates and even fewer modes, but this year’s iteration looks to be the most jam-packed entry so far. Still, even with the anticipated create-a-team this time around, don’t expect a completely new game from last year; F1 Manager 2024 uses the same engine and provides a very similar experience to F1 Manager 2023, albeit with roster updates and more new stuff than previous years.
Still No Media Management Like Interviews and Press Conferences
One of the missing features that I’d like to see implemented next year is managing the media side of the sport. The game would feel so much more feature-rich if it had press conferences before race day where your answers affected public opinion, further influencing team motivation and morale. My favorite aspect of a lot of sport games’ career modes has typically been managing public relations and finding ways to hype up the fans of the team, but this media/PR element is still missing in this year’s iteration of F1 Manager.
Can Add F2 and F3 Drivers to Your Created Team To Form a True Underdog
What’s really cool about creating your own team in F1 Manager 2024 is the ability to build a true underdog team using F2 and F3 drivers. Past games had F2 and F3 talent for recruiting, sure, but you still had to use the pre-established F1 team drivers as the baseline. Similar to using an old beater car and upgrading it to win against more powerful cars in car-PGs of old like Need for Speed Underground, you can now create a team using F2/F3 underdog talent and build them up over time to beat the Verstappens of the world.
Research and Design Should Appeal to Fans of the Broader Sim Management Genre
One of the engaging aspects of F1 Manager is deciding if you want to research next-gen car parts for next season, or implement small stat upgrades for the current season with design. You only have a set amount of budget and time to allocate to these, so it provides a fun strategic layer. Civilization players will find themselves right at home with this strategic allocation of research and design. If you like management sims in general, F1 Manager might scratch that itch.
Cannot Control Races Themselves
This one comes as no surprise to most gamers familiar with management sims, but for newcomers to the genre, no you can’t actually control the cars during races. Your occupation will instead be dictating how aggressive or conservative your team’s driving style is as they race. The new helicam and mechanical failure system will help races feel more active as you micromanage your team to victory from the director’s chair.
Can Finally Simulate Races To See Results Quickly
Want to focus on pre and post-race management exclusively? Well, skipping multiple races in a batch still isn’t an option, but you can now simulate a race weekend for the first time in F1 Manager 2024. Previous years of the series could only simulate practice and qualifying races, so this is yet another new addition to this year’s game that fans are happy to see. We have yet to see just how balanced the computer is when a player isn’t directing things during a race, but with the new layers of management added this year, you may want to oversee the races yourself anyway.
Finally Have Livery Customization for Cars and Suits
Create A Team mode brings the much-requested livery editor for the first time in the series. For those not aware, liveries are basically the arrangement of car decals and logos on the car. The range of user-generated liveries they’ve shown so far looks really nice, and I like how vibrant the color combinations look here. In addition to custom designs for your car and suit, there are over 50 fictional sponsor logos to decorate with. These fictional sponsors aren’t just for show though, since they tie into a brand new sponsorship feature that has objectives and rewards for each sponsor you take.
Improved AI Drivers
Previous F1 Manager games were occasionally plagued by AI drivers blocking the line and behaving sporadically during races. The AI was hit or miss with previous entries, which is not something you want in a race you cannot control yourself. Thankfully, F1 Manager 2024 boasts improved driver AI resulting in more balanced and realistic behavior. We have yet to really see just how good the AI has gotten, but it’s obvious based on player feedback that they fixed some of the more obvious issues with previous entries.
Over 30,000 New Radio Comms Providing Lots of Team Banter and Unique Dialogue
Radio comm banter has always been one of the most beloved aspects of F1 Manager, with a reported 40,000 lines of banter being featured in last year’s title. In total, it’s looking like F1 Manager 2024 will have a whopping 70,000 broadcast radio comms to look forward to. If you only play with a single team and use the same drivers and engineers, it’s likely you’ll just hear a fraction of that, but it’s still quite impressive. And yes, we’re sure some of these will just be variations of Lewis Hamilton complaining about the car being slow.
Note: The views expressed in this article are those of the author and do not necessarily represent the views of, and should not be attributed to, GamingBolt as an organization.
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