This came out two months ago on PC, XBox and PlayStation. I am absolutely loving it on PC and Steam Deck. Starting my third season with McLaren and I’ve slowly poached staff and drivers to build a winning team.

As most management games, it’s predominantly studying figures, balancing progression and finances but it is phenomenal when you get to the races. I’ve had some absolutely stunning races where strategy has been on point resulting in higher positions than the car and driver deserve and on the flip side, messed things up to fall outside the point for a car deemed certain to win.

There is real life radio comms from the drivers and engineers giving it that bit more immersion and Crofty is here commentating and introducing the event as expected. Technically the race sections should rename the game to F1 Race Engineer 22 but I am absolutely enthralled with it.

I was disappointed with the graphics initially as they had a weird blur and just looked off. Turns out there is a config file that had my resolution running at 72% and motion blur was on too causing it to look smeared. Looks significantly better after that change is made.

There is one bug that is irritating in the strategy view. It seems to calculate the Hard compounds incorrectly and considers them the fastest by a considerable margin. So yeah, the last patch buggered that but apparently that’s going to be fixed in the next big patch.

Next major patch is apparently the last one they are doing before concentrating on the next year’s game but I’m well chuffed with it so far. It’s nice to have a fully licensed management game like this. Motorsport Manager (only played on Switch) was great and scratched that itch but having the real names and snippets of radio conversations adds so much for a complete package.