F1 Manager 2024 Preview: Five Things To Know About This Year’s Title

It doesn’t feel all that long ago since Frontier first launched the F1 Manager series of games, but already, we’re gearing up for the arrival of the third title.

F1 Manager 2024 is set to release later this month and ahead of it landing on digital storefronts, we’ve been playing a preview build of the title. Here are a few things to know.

You can make your team’s journey as easy or hard as you wish

‘Create a Team’ is the headline addition to F1 Manager 2024, allowing you to take the reins of your own outfit.

How you wish to start your team off is entirely up to you. You can go all-out with maximum facilities, a huge piggy bank and the best car on the grid from the get-go, start yourself as a barebones backmarker or anything in between. In our playthrough, we opted to throw all of our money at the facilities, put both Verstappen and Hamilton in the line-up (who wouldn’t want that?) and then go for a back-of-the-grid car to develop.

There’s also a selection of preset backgrounds, giving you contexts like running a car manufacturer’s new F1 operations or a legacy team returning to the sport like a phoenix from the ashes, which will determine the budgets, car and facilities you start with.

Mentality management is key

Another big addition to F1 Manager 2024 is a mentality mechanic for your drivers and staff.

This means balancing the needs of your employees is a big consideration. Focusing too much on one driver could leave your other feeling undervalued, while equally not putting enough emphasis on your star could agitate them. We noticed pretty quickly that having the two greatest drivers of this generation in the worst car on the grid very quickly wound them up, unsurprisingly…

Similarly, team performance can have a positive or negative effect on your key staff members which will impact their output.

Sponsorships work differently

Sponsor packages now play a bigger role in the management of your team. Rather than simply picking sponsors and meeting targets for them to hand you money, the system in F1 Manager 2024 is more nuanced.

Along with picking a main sponsor, you’ve got the option to pick five additional and optional sponsors. These often come with obligatory activities, offering you extra cash at the cost of having an effect on your other operations – be that a drop in a driver’s mentality due to them making an appearance for corporate bigwigs, one of your facilities’ output because of a filming day, or many other scenarios.

You can set up driver academies

Ever wanted to farm young racing drivers? Well, F1 Manager 2024 will let you do that.

Previously, if you wanted to train a young driver, you’d have to hire them in a reserve role and give them as much practice time as possible or risk it by throwing them in a second seat. Now though, you’re able to send them to F3 and F2 to develop.

We haven’t got far enough into this preview build to see how effective it is long-term, but it’s one to keep an eye on for the full release.

The core gameplay hasn’t changed much

Despite these new game-changing features, the core gameplay of F1 Manager 2024 hasn’t really changed.

Sessions still work in the same way, you’re still dependent on sliders for car setup and how you manage the races is no different. Similarly, it looks graphically identical.

We’ll leave that to you to decide if that’s a good or bad thing for the time being. Stay tuned for our full review ahead of F1 Manager 2024’s release on 23 July.