F1 Manager 2022
PREVIEW
Newer fans might be wondering what a
team principal even does, if not berating
Michael Masi in very public, televised radio
communications or insulting their
contemporaries at other teams. The
answer, as F1 Manager 2022
comprehensively demonstrates, is: a lot.
You’re in charge of both the car’s
development, and the team’s. You’re
assigning people to work on a new
front wing, but also managing the
facilities that those front wing
designers work within. If you don’t have a
state of the art wind tunnel to test your
theoretical designs in, you’re probably not
getting many purple sectors.
That level of control splits the game
structurally into two distinct components.
The first is a set of menus covering all
aspects of the team itself day to day, from
R&D to sponsor agreements, staff
assignments to emails. The other is
TV-syle event coverage with a strategic
layer for planning and monitoring tyre
stints and radio comms between you and
the drivers, which allow you to control
their pace and react to emerging
situations like safety cars and weather
changes. There’s a fully 3D race enginehere, but it doesn’t go supersoft-to-
supersoft with Codemasters’ gorgeous F1
2021 for outright fidelity. It scales down
the lighting complexity and poly counts,
and doesn’t feature anything like the same
realistic AI. But it looks convincing as
TV-style coverage, bolstered by the Sky
Sports commentary team chipping in at
key moments and, in my personal
favourite touch, race radio between the
drivers and their engineers when you give
them an instruction.ALL F1
During the racing at Albert Park shown to
PC Gamer in an offline gameplay demo,
the two Ferraris of Leclerc and Sainz
wrestled to work their way through Perez
in P2 and then use the free track in front of
them to chip away Verstappen’s lead. It
was immediately clear how evident your
commands are in each driver’s actions.
There’s a nice wide gamut of pace and AI
decision-making between the different
pace levels you can assign to drivers.
This being a management game, in the
end it all comes down to resources. There
are two chiefly important ones here:
money and tyre life. It takes vast
sums to keep any F1 operation ticking
over, so securing lucrative
sponsorship contracts and meeting
board performance targets to secure
higher funding levels is vital. In the shorter
term, being kind to tyres and effectively
managing their wear keeps your pace high
across the full race and minimises pit
stops, earning back a chunk of time on
other cars who might have the pace
advantage on paper.
That proposition probably won’t be
bringing in the F1-agnostic players in their
droves, but it’s truly exciting to have a
studio as experienced as Frontier at the
helm of this one. Just like Football
Manager, it’ll only get dangerously
absorbing once you’re a few seasons in,
and we’ve yet to see how regulation
changes, silly season driver moves, and
the like change the complexion of the
sport over time. We’ll have to reserve
judgment until that point, but at this early
stage it’s encouraging just to see that the
minute details of tyre deg and front wing
airflow are really at the heart of being a
good virtual team principal.
Phil IwaniukF
irst things first: no, you can’t go storming
off to race control to argue your case in
F1 Manager 2022. This isn’t quite the
sport as it is, but the sport as it might be- races and championships in Frontier’s debut
licensed title are decided strategically, not
politically. So how does that play out?
Frontier steers clear of politicking
in its licensed team principal simF1 MANAGER 2022
BOLSTERED BY THE SKY
SPORTS COMMENTARY TEAM
CHIPPING IN AT KEY MOMENTSRELEASE
2022DEVELOPER
Frontier DevelopmentsPUBLISHER
In-houseLINK
f1manager.comNEED TO KNOWF I R S T
LOOKAlbert Park, scene of Ferrari’s
recent heroics. Great to see it
back on the calendar.