I’ll admit that I generally prefer to have direct control in racing games, but the F1 Manager series has made me equally excited to work behind the scenes. Watching a risky overtake pay off from the pit wall can be similarly thrilling to burning that rubber yourself, and a focus on team development and overall strategy between races can be refreshing. While F1 Manager 2024 is your typical annual update in many respects, content to make incremental improvements over massive changes, several of those tweaks leave developer Frontier's latest management sim more compelling than ever.
This year's biggest addition is the new 'Create a Team' feature, which offers a pleasantly surprising range of customization options. For example, different engine manufacturers add necessary strategy, asking you to pick your priorities between aspects like durability or fuel efficiency. Liveries and team outfits can also be customized in detail, with a nice assortment of preset designs that are useful for the less artistically gifted like myself. But one of the most interesting decisions is how you can set your team's backstory, which determines your overall goals. You could choose to be the small team with solid expertise but low funding, or the hungry newcomers determined to win at all costs, or plenty more. These options realistically impact your overall chances, and if you'd rather start entirely on your own terms instead, you can thankfully ignore them, too.
I appreciate how granular F1 Manager 2024's difficulty is when creating your team without selecting an origin. Different initial budgets, car performance settings, and facility qualities let you choose between starting near the front or rising from backmarkers to eventual champions. Of course, you can't set every facility to five stars immediately, which still keeps things balanced. There's a hard limit for improvement points, too, so choosing between improved race performance, manufacturing speed for car parts, or even the HQ's helipad provides welcome depth.
In previous games, choosing a constructor was effectively a silent difficulty setting since a team’s performance in-game matched that of their real-life counterpart. That made choosing midfield contenders like Alpine more appealing when I sought a challenge. Securing wins is always exciting, but spending time upgrading your team to earn them yourself feels infinitely better than being gift-wrapped victory simply by picking Red Bull. I'm also pleased that F1 Manager 2024 retains 2023's post-launch difficulty settings for race days and your opponents' car development, making more teams immediately viable.
Selecting the 'Your Story' origin in Create A Team lets you customize the initial team quality, and there's no restrictions on which drivers and staff you pick. In a year where the driver line-up is almost identical to the previous season, adding an 11th team that can sign existing Formula 1 drivers (or even F2 and F3 rookies) shakes this dynamic up nicely. Rather than choose Max Verstappen and Charles Leclerc immediately, I ultimately signed Nico Hulkenberg and Yuki Tsunoda, intent on securing their first podium finishes.
F1 Manager has never felt too heavy on micromanagement, and that’s especially true with the slightly improved UI this year. Once everything's set up, a new season with your custom team is otherwise similar to a standard campaign, which isn’t a bad thing. You still need to guide the team's overall focus, instructing engineers to create upgrades for this year's car along the way. However, because each year brings new regulations, you face a choice: Do you keep improving this year's car or invest in research for next season? Striking a balance remains rewarding when you succeed, and the cost cap ensures you can't just throw money around to solve every problem. And once a season is complete, the board measures your performance against its expectations, and the cycle repeats into the new year, so there’s always a drive to keep going.
Keeping staff spirits high remains essential, and F1 Manager 2024 uses a new 'Mentality System,' highlighting the team's overall mood instead of individual staff and drivers. It's a slight improvement over the previous confidence system, offering a more practical approach that immediately details the most pressing issues. Pit crews retain 23's monthly training regimes, and it’s still fun to balance improving pit times and avoiding fatigue by pushing them too hard. After all, a rested crew is less likely to make mistakes during critical pit stops.
I'm less impressed by the contracts system, and as team principal, you’ll have to interact with it a lot as you negotiate contract extensions with existing staff or sign new talent. It's a tedious process because asking the person you want to sign a contract immediately, as opposed to giving them a week or two to decide, negatively impacts negotiations. For example, trying to sign Tsunoda to Red Bull saw him reply after two weeks of waiting, only for him to counter offer saying he wanted an extra $7k on the existing $3.5 million salary offer. It remains a frustratingly drawn-out process, and Yuki wasn't the only person losing patience during renegotiations.
Extra cash was previously earned by choosing optional performance targets from sponsors before races, like reaching Q2 in qualifying. You couldn't set deals until your second season, so it's great to see F1 Manager 2024 use a more dynamic sponsorship system. Title sponsors award more tangible benefits, and your earnings now depend on your confidence. Weighing a hefty upfront payment with minimal payouts for race day results against the opposite offer can be a satisfying risk vs reward situation. Each main sponsor requests various "engagement activities" every six weeks, offering financial rewards but causing issues like reduced driver performance. It's a welcome change that better reflects the sport's heavily commercialized nature.
Race weekends follow the real-life format, usually splitting your time between three practice sessions, the qualifier, and finally the main race. Six weekends out of each year also include an enjoyably straightforward sprint race where you don't need to worry about considerations like long-term tyre strategies. While F1 Manager 23 followed the 2022 season's rules, F1 Manager 2024 now uses a less than thrilling sprint qualifying approach split into three sessions before those races. I can't fault Frontier for following the current real-life structure; the extra work is just a hassle for comparatively few points when measured against the main race.
I'm therefore glad that F1 Manager 2024 allows you to skip the actual races by letting the team automatically handle them, a feature that was previously only available for practice sessions and qualifiers. I can't always recommend doing that when you'll generally get the best performance via manual control, and rushing through the campaign would be missing the point, but at least having the option may be a blessing if you're on your sixth campaign and facing the opening race in Bahrain yet again.
Most of the time, of course, F1 Manager values confident strategies, and racing involves managing three critical areas from the pit wall: tyres, fuel, and the battery. Good tyre strategy can determine races, so it's pleasing when your decisions about which two dry tyre compounds to use before the final lap pay off. Tyre degradation feels similar to last year, and ordering drivers to speed up is another tricky choice to make since doing so affects the temperature and how quickly you burn through them. Electric boosts via ERS (Energy Recovery System) can close some critical gaps with opponents, though letting this completely drain comes with risks of its own as it makes you vulnerable to being overtaken.
Fuel consumption also needs monitoring, but one of this year's significant changes involves preventing your engine from overheating to preserve its long-term durability. You can only buy so many engines per year and extra unit costs are steep, even before incurring a subsequent grid penalty for using extra parts. Those penalties can feel harsh when you're already pushing for every point available, so getting through a season with minimal purchases feels like an accomplishment.
Overheating also ties into a compelling new mechanical failure system. TV broadcast-style replays will point out mechanical faults but rarely indicate what the actual problem is – that seemed slightly pointless beyond informing me of who's got issues, but I enjoyed this challenge overall. Just like the real thing, some faults need mitigating mid-race by requesting that your drivers follow specific tactics, such as avoiding high-risk kerbs and driving in clean air. I never really noticed this system’s absence until now, and it immediately feels right at home.
Accidents also seem slightly more realistic, though not majorly. Incidents that would normally finish a driver's race in real life often wouldn't retire cars in previous entries – this issue hasn't entirely disappeared here, but it was less frequent during my latest campaigns. The visible damage to cars during collisions could also still benefit from looking more realistic, as heavy impacts rarely show more than some scattered debris.
Finally, if you're after something different, race replays return once more. They usually involve improving on your chosen team's real-life results compared to what happened in the actual race, which is fine, but the more specialized events keep this interesting with less realistic scenarios – things like having equal performance settings for each team. What's really fun are the events that challenge your strategic thinking even further, like figuring out how to guide Ferrari to victory in Italy despite a mechanical fault near the end.
