Let's get one thing clear: if you’re searching for a high-speed simulation racer that puts you toe-to-toe with Max Verstappen, F1 Manager 2022 isn’t for you. Marking the first entry in a new F1 Manager series, Frontier Developments takes a different approach from Codemasters’ F1 22, swapping the driver’s seat for the pit wall. More akin to Football Manager, racing management games are a rarity on PlayStation — Motorsport Manager never jumped across — but Frontier’s filling the niche well.
F1 Manager features all ten of F1’s current teams and twenty drivers, each with varying budgets and two objectives from the board. As team principal, our immediate goal regards the constructors’ championship but there are long-term aims too like regular podium finishes. Expectations align with real-world performances, so anyone missing top results for Red Bull won’t last, while Williams is just happy scoring points. Like picking your local side in FIFA, choosing a smaller team and working your way up the ladder feels more rewarding. Unfortunately, you can’t create your own team, so we chose Aston Martin, whose lofty aims involved taking eighth in the constructors' championship.
Management isn’t granular in Frontier’s sim; the big decisions are your only real concern. With car performance, engineers can improve your existing car or focus on research projects for the next season. Anyone choosing less competitive teams may find research more beneficial since that can yield significant long-term benefits. Facilities are upgradeable too for a hefty cost, providing benefits like improved team morale in exchange for increased upkeep fees. There’s plenty to consider and F1 Manager 2022 eases you in well thanks to its optional guidance system.
After finishing your daily business, race weekend will soon arrive. Alongside those board expectations, every team has set performance targets from sponsors and hitting these earns a nice payout. Optional targets can be included, ranging from recording the fastest lap to hitting Q2 in qualifying, but failing to achieve any you’ve selected incurs a small fee. Still, the potential payout is significantly greater, so for anyone feeling confident, it’s a risk or reward situation. Once everything’s been reviewed, it’s time to hit the tracks.
Just like a real Grand Prix, there are three practice sessions that let you fine-tune car setups and familiarise the two drivers with the circuit. Main drivers can be swapped out for your reserve driver in first practice, letting them earn experience. It’s a great place to test your setup, allowing drivers to familiarise themselves with the circuit and car alike. The more confident a driver feels with the car, the faster they’ll drive. Qualifying uses a three-stage knock-out format, seeing the five slowest drivers eliminated until we reach the top ten. As a quick aside, sprint races aren’t included. If you’re not worried about managing every detail during practice or qualifying, though, the team can automatically handle it, but you can’t skip the main event.
Come race day, select a pit stop strategy, check the weather forecast, wait for the lights, and you’re off. Once a race begins, you’ve got no direct control over drivers; your role is better summarised as nudging them through orders. As team principal, you can issue pace commands which affect fuel consumption, direct how aggressively they drive — which impacts tyre degradation — plus maintain battery life for DRS. Should you wish, you can issue team orders like avoiding fighting teammates or asking one driver to hold up any cars behind. Each decision counts to gain that competitive advantage, and because you can pause the race, there’s no need to rush.
F1 Manager 2022’s a game of patience — especially when choosing a lower-end team — but pulling off successful strategies and securing those crucial points is incredibly satisfying. We lost count of how many times we finished a race, only to find ourselves going “one more round” before suddenly realising it was 3am. Even smaller things like that last lap overtake prove tense and you feel pride in your efforts. Controls are well adapted for consoles too, feeling slightly fiddly given the breadth of options but easy to learn. Accessibility options like alternative UI colours for the colour blind are also a welcome addition.
This isn’t all just stats and graphs either: everything’s handled through an impressive 3D engine that conveys the action well. Sure, these visuals don’t quite match F1 22 – a few character models veer towards uncanny valley alongside the odd graphical pop-in – but F1 Manager 2022 captures the spirit of watching live races brilliantly. Not only did the actual drivers provide voice lines for radio messages, but incident replays feel like they’ve been pulled from a Sky Sports highlight reel. Should you fast forward the race, it'll swap to a map view, reverting back whenever action is required.
Our biggest problem is that on-track events don’t always feel realistic. On several occasions, drivers barely going wide received an overly enthusiastic response from commentator David Croft. Though, to his credit, that’s entirely on-brand. More egregiously, we noticed significant crashes on several occasions which would see a driver go straight into a wall, only for them to keep going. These aren’t major complaints — F1 Manager 2022 does a great job of keeping you immersed — but small things like this can chip away at that.
Once the race is done, drivers earn experience that eventually reward development points, used for improving skills like braking or defending. If anyone’s consistently underperforming, you can scout replacements and negotiate contracts. So, by 2023, we’d replaced Lance Stroll with Valterri Bottas. We recommend not being a stingy boss; every failed negotiation sees them lose patience with you, eventually shutting you off. Come the season’s end, you'll be ranked against the board's prior goals, wrap up any outlying business, and before you know it, we’re doing it all over again. Maybe Aston Martin will take sixth this time? We’re aiming high, make no mistake. Future seasons are mostly similar, only this time you can negotiate sponsorship deals and engine suppliers.
Conclusion
F1 Manager 2022 is a strong first entry in Frontier’s new series, filling a niche that’s been sorely lacking on PlayStation for years. Capturing the spirit of Formula 1 with its strong attention to detail, there’s some thrilling races to be had and we’re impressed by how well it handles race days with its 3D engine. As a management sim, it’s a slow burner and we do wish you could create your own teams, but it still holds a distinct charm of its own. If you've got the patience for the long haul, F1 fans won’t want to miss this.
Comments 15
was hoping for a review on this, and it sounds detailed, glad of ability to skip sessions if needed.
guess it goes on my shopping list as well priced @ around 35 on amazon.
edit, guess im waiting for patches after the below comments
This is an exceedingly generous review given just how many severe faults players have found with this game within days of launch and the number of refunds that have been issued for this game.
Tyre degradation and temperature is pretty much irrelevant, dirty air isn't really a thing at all, a one-stop strategy is OP, AI is badly scripted, DRS and the defend feature is OP, pushing the developmental sliders to the right means you'll have an absurd rocket by season's end, the AI isn't aggressive in its own car development at all because it only uses one engineer per project, senior drivers keep developing instead of regressing, experience for drivers and staff appears arbitrary and goes against reason, the player has way too much money to spend, cars just bug out on the track, the list goes on and on if you take a quick peek at the game's subreddit.
Players have looked into the actual game files and this shown what an incredibly basic, shallow, bare bones effort this game is. It's just the same routine of racing a clueless AI, randomly select which parts to develop in between races and hit "next" on the calendar with virtually nothing else to do.
I would say it's a fine first effort but it doesn't take more than 5-10 hours to see that there are definite aspects of this game where that effort was at a minimum level, if that. What a shame because the idea of closely managing an F1 team sounds so fun and they sold this game as just that in the months leading up to launch.
Big fan of F1 and management games so of course I bought this - a rare day one purchase for me. Even rarer now with PS Extra. Kinda wish I hadn't
It appears to be amazing at first, let's be clear about that. However, within a couple of races things will begin to annoy and frustrate you.
You'll start skipping the practice sessions because they take too long but then get annoyed because your driver confidence and set-up isn't perfect because you haven't played the silly minigame with moving bars. You'll start simulating quali for same reason. You'll go from watching large parts of the race to running them all at 16x and still thinking it's taking too long. Tyre wear doesn't work correctly. Neither does fuel mode. Neither do the safety car rules (like in real F1 eh, Lewis). Drivers on out or in laps during quali don't move off line so can wreck your laps even if you do try to manage the sessions manually. Signing drivers recruits them immediately, no option for them to start for the next season. There are weird issues (exploits, really) regarding car design which I won't go into here.
For me, it all became a great faff without enough reward. And the old Motorsport Manager game never felt like that, which is very odd.
I wished for a new F1 management game for years. Be careful what you wish for. Game deleted off console already. Hope this counterpoint comment at least gives potential buyers pause for thought.
@bozz haha great minds think alike - you beat me to it by a minute, but same thoughts exactly and I'm glad it's not just me that felt an alternative viewpoint needed to be put forward.
@Gamer_Guy Yeah encountering some of these problems and reading what other players have dug up in the files makes me wonder if the devs even have a fundamental understanding of F1 and how these cars and teams work. It's such a surface-level attempt at an F1 management game that it's hard to even give it much credit as a starting point for this series. I know they've already released a patch and said they're working on some of the complaints but some of these red flags are really, really big.
@bozz I'm a little annoyed at myself really, I almost always wait a few months before buying anything and then of course I'd have read all the stuff on Reddit and elsewhere and avoided. They got me as it combined two of my loves - F1, and management games. And PS5, so no refunds here for me unlike the fortunate PC players!
I hate to say it, but a lot of the media reviews were clearly written with either a few hours of play only, or (more likely), by reviewers who simply don't understand a lot of the intricacies of F1. Although I think almost anyone would discover the inherent problems in this game with a sustained period of play, F1 fan or not.
Yeah, got similar comments to those above. I will give it the benefit of the doubt through patches though. If it’s not much better in two months shame on them.
The tyres literally don’t matter at all
For the sake of transparency, I received the review code last Wednesday, which I believe is after the patch dropped. So I can't comment on how it played beforehand
@Terra Thanks. I can't speak for others, but my comment was certainly based on game in its current, most recently patched, state.
Unfortunately, the patches haven't solved the major issues here.
This game really sounds interesting. I didn't play sport manager since ZX Spectrum - Football Manager. Maybe I'll give it a try...
Hope there is a Gold Trophy for "Nicholas Latifi won't screw his or someones race" and "Win a race with Ferrari team while using max. 250 strategy plans"
Time for everyone to show Ferrari how it's done.
I really cannot see how this game deserves an 8/10... Just makes me think you were paid to give a positive review, really not a good look.
Prior to it's release I was so hyped for this, so hyped that I pre-ordered the it. So imagine my surprise and disappointment upon this game's release, a shame so shallow and packed with broken systems and bugs
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That is just a snippet of the issues found within this game... These are big time immersion issues and you give it an 8/10 lol. Bugs aside, the game is shallow and lacks the depth that I expected from a Motorsport Management game..... Motorsport Manager done a far better job.... Now that was a title created by true fans.
How FD thought it would be cool to release the game in this state is beyond me. So disappointed...
I agree on what others have said, but it does seem the developers are looking into the issues and the next patch is hoping to correct the tyre deg issues and a few others things
https://www.reddit.com/r/F1Manager/comments/x7a17n/news_on_update_17/
I got it on launch and enjoyed it for a week or two but now waiting on the 1.17 patch (which should be out next week) to continue and hope this makes things a bit more challenging
As this is a multi-year deal with F1 to supply a a yearly instalment I'm hoping they learn from their mistakes and next year game is a lot deeper experience
@F1Fan Agree entirely. I feel a 7 would have been generous, and a 6 the very most it deserves.
I suspect Frontier had little choice but to release it when they did due to their contract with FIA, not that it excuses the state of the game after how long it has been in development.
Maybe it's just me, but I think some of these comments are a little bit harsh. The game isn't perfect, but for a first effort, I'm finding it really enjoyable.
Just over halfway through the season, and it's been fun trying to take Williams up the grid. I was a little concerned that choosing a team higher up the grid would make things too easy, so this has hit the sweet spot for me.
I think some people expect too much as well. But personally, I'm enjoying this more than I enjoyed Motorsport Manager. But I guess it comes down to personal preference.
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