F1 Manager 24 review: another step up the podium

F1 Manager 24 is the third entry in Frontier Developments’ young Formula 1 racing management sim series, and once again it builds upon this promising franchise with some fantastic additions - not least of all the fantastic Create-A-Team mode that lets you add an eleventh team all of your own to the grid.

On-track simulation has seen a notable step up, too. The introduction of mechanical failures means that both you and the AI drivers can suffer devastating setbacks mid-race at a moment’s notice. And on top of that, driver AI - for the most part - does a very good job of replicating real-world driving styles.

While some irksome bugs remain, and the game’s user interface remains largely identical to last year’s entry, F1 Manager 24 is a massive improvement to what was already a compelling strategy experience, and it shouldn’t be missed by Formula 1 and management sim fans both. 

The eleventh man

F1 Manager 24’s marquee feature is undoubtedly the Create-A-Team mode. It does what it says on the tin, letting you bring an eleventh team into the 2024 F1 season and beyond. You pick your two drivers, your staff, budget, sponsors, and so on. You’ll also get to define your team’s look with some pretty great livery editors for your car, racing suit, and team logo.

Having full freedom to create a team without any of those silly FIA restrictions of course means that you can get weird with it. My first attempt was a team specifically designed to childishly undermine the Stroll-owned Aston Martin team. I nicked their star driver, Fernando Alonso, and paired him up with F2 star Isack Hadjar. Then, at the opening race at Bahrain, Alonso was muscled off-track by Haas’s Kevin Magnussen, promptly ending his race after a promising result in the third phase of qualifying. This was also my first inkling that F1 Manager 24’s AI might be a little too accurate for its own good.

The crash had left me feeling bitter, so I opted to start over. After all, it was only the first race of the season. So it was out with ‘Aston Fartin’, and in with something more mature. More believable. Something with credible backing from a respectable British powerhouse. Enter the TechRadar Greggs F1 team. With Alex Albon and Nico Hulkenberg at the helm, we became a strong midfield contender that, on occasion, got very close to challenging for podium finishes throughout the season.

So what goes into creating a team? Well, there’s a robust creation process that firstly sees you picking your drivers and staff including sporting director and race engineers. There’s no budgetary limit here at first, but you will have to be mindful of salary in the season proper; if your staff is too expensive for what your chosen budget allows, that’ll only create headaches for you down the road. One nice touch, though, is that if you pair up a driver with their real-world race engineer, they’ll get a morale boost from having worked with each other in the past.

On that note, I really like that you need to put some careful thought into planning out your team, especially if you’ve selected a small-to-medium-sized budget to start out with. But somewhere you can go buck wild in terms of creativity with no limits is in aesthetics. 

F1 Manager 24 has some great and easy-to-use editors for your car livery, racing suit, and team logo. While the car liveries’ layouts and patterns are preset and can’t be altered in and of themselves, you can fully adjust their colors, and apply gradients and different types of paint (metallic, glossy, etc.). The same goes for the logo editor, where you can piece together preset shapes and lettering to create an emblem for your team. Basically, don’t be surprised if you spend upwards of an hour in this initial creation process. And fear not; you’re freely able to make edits to your customizations at any time outside of a race weekend. 

Getting Crofty

The on-track experience in F1 Manager 24 is similar to that of the previous entries, but a number of improvements to racing heighten both immersion and enjoyment. In case you’re unfamiliar with the series, you don’t take direct control of your cars as you would in Codemasters’ F1 24. Your drivers will instead race based on the instructions you give them.

As before, your in-race dashboard is split between your two drivers. Both have menus on either side of the screen that let you adjust tire management, race pace, and your Energy Recovery System (ERS) which can help you get the measure of a rival during overtakes. Pre-race, you’ll also need to adjust car setup to your drivers’ liking to improve their confidence and choose pit stop strategies for the race itself.

There are a lot of similarities to the previous version, then, but F1 Manager 24 still evolves the series in some rather transformative ways. For one, you’ll now need to be conscious of the possibility of mechanical failures for your engine, gearbox, and ERS battery. The risk of these increases as the parts wear down from race to race, and they can range from manageable minor faults to major problems that can have you retiring a car.

These mechanical faults can add some great tension to races, not to mention a lot of decision-making: do you ease up on pace to minimize risk at the cost of points? Do you retire a driver to save a crucial part for a future race? Or do you go flat out and hope to make it to the end? To even the odds, mechanical failures can also affect AI drivers, and I found I was often able to squeeze my drivers into points-scoring positions thanks to rival teams’ misfortunes.

One other thing to note is improvements to driver AI. I have no idea if this was intentional, but the AI of certain drivers seemed to be scarily accurate to their real-world counterparts. I’ve already established that in-game Kevin Magnussen seems to maintain his trademark real-world aggression. But over the course of a season, I also witnessed both Alpine drivers collide and take each other out of a race. Twice. Logan Sargeant was often prone to tire-destroying spins. And poor Sergio Perez was largely off the pace compared to his championship-winning teammate, Max Verstappen, over at Red Bull. Such quirks helped races feel very dynamic and alive, and it’s very common for races to change up on a dime thanks to yellow and red flag stoppages.

Lastly, I have to mention the dramatic improvements to team radio. F1 Manager 24 features hundreds of new lines pulled from official race broadcasts. Drivers and engineers will more frequently reference other drivers by name and how far ahead or behind they are. Furthermore, drivers and engineers who’ve worked together can call each other by name. Once again, it’s a great touch that shows Frontier was willing to go the extra mile. 

Buttoned up

Overall, F1 Manager 24 is a brilliant improvement on what was already a very strong foundation. Race weekends feel that much more unpredictable thanks to mechanical faults and improved driver AI. Also welcome are the new difficulty options - handy if you want an easier or tougher time of things when it comes to races, budget, and car development. I did note some race-affecting issues over the course of a season, however.

For one, I occasionally ran into a bug during qualifying, where one of my drivers would stay in the garage despite my command to send them on their out lap. As such, they’d effectively be locked in the garage for the remainder of the qualifying session before they could even set a time.

There is still the (thankfully very infrequent) odd bit of behavior with the simulation itself. Cars will sometimes mildly clip through each other instead of colliding - particularly at corners - and some crashes still give the impression the cars are made out of rubber; head-on collisions with a barrier often see the car comically bounce away, for example.

Otherwise, outside of the largely identical user interface that made me wonder if I’d loaded up the wrong game, there is very little to fault F1 Manager 24 on. This is a great example of an annual entry providing meaningful, transformative improvements that handily makes this the best entry in the series to date.

Accessibility

There aren’t a ton of accessibility options in F1 Manager 24, but what’s here is very welcome. The dedicated accessibility tab in the options menu lets you mute background noises during in-race conversations with your crew, and you can switch to mono audio should you prefer. Furthermore, there are three colorblind options (deuteranopia, protanopia, and tritanopia) for the game’s user interface. For streamers, the ability to replace licensed music in the audio tab is also great to see. 

Should I play F1 Manager 24?

Play it if...

Don't play it if...

How we reviewed F1 Manager 24

I played F1 Manager 24 over the course of a week, giving myself enough time to play through one full season, the interim afterwards, and some of the next season to get a handle on features like driver transfers and board expectations. I played the game on PC with a mouse and keyboard setup, specifically the Corsair K65 and Corsair M65. My rig, which includes an Nvidia GeForce RTX 3060Ti, was enough to run the game at maximum graphical settings at a clean 60fps.