Frontier’s upcoming F1 Manager 2022 is looking to be a promising new management game, and now they are showing more glimpses of it via a new behind-the-scenes dev diary video series.
The first of which is focusing on explaining what the role of being an F1 team boss, or as they call it in the biz the Team Principal, entails. In F1 Manager 2022, your job as Team Principal covers all the job scope you would expect from the real-life equivalent. From managing the team’s R&D and monitoring the budget not exceeding the cost cap, to calling the shots on race day on when to pit and instruct drivers on when they should push or maintain pace.
The video has commentary from many different members of the development team, including fittingly enough Frontier’s own boss David Braben, as well as from the F1 side of things which includes former Ferarri and Brawn GP boss (and currently F1’s Director Of Motosport) Ross Brawn.
More interestingly are the new glimpses of gameplay of F1 Manager 2022. We get to see more menus (using work-in-progress assets so it’s subject to change), such as how the finance screen breaks down your income and expenditures as well as the cost cap. As with the current season of F1, teams are not allowed to spend more than $140 million USD per year or they get a penalty.
Similar to other sport management games, the 10 teams on the grid all have different seasonal and long-term targets that you need to achieve. In the video, the on-form (well, sort of) Ferrari team is aiming to finish 1st this season and achieve a constructor’s championship, while the currently struggling Mercedes is targeting a best-of-the-rest finish of 3rd.
In contrast to that, a mid-field team like AlphaTauri will want to be a podium contender in the long run. As long as you can get the board members happy by hitting most of the targets, you’ll keep your job.
We also get a look on how the staff screen works. Key staff features the Technical Chief, Head of Aerodynamics as well as the two Race Engineers assigned to the two race cars. And these roles feature real staff with stats.
Whilst the engineering team, scouting team and pit crew are labelled as “sub-teams” where they are abstracted with more staff on the sub-team equalling better performance at the cost of higher monthly salary costs.
Another interesting screen here is the post-race emails. One of the ones shown in the video has a report of a new suspension upgrade and there are detailed stats to go with it. Instead of just one simple value to indicate performance, you have a breakdown of different stats like how it affects brake cooling, how the car can handle low, medium or high-speed corners, and many more. It is suggested that it’s possible to build a car that can be highly specialised to certain track types.
If your familiarity with the pinnacle of motorsport starts and stops at each Sunday of a Grand Prix, you’d likely be fascinated in seeing many of the intricate and behind-the-scenes efforts that you will be in control of in F1 Manager 2022. And if you are an enthusiast that keeps up with the latest off-track development and news, looks like there’s plenty here that the devs got it right from what they’ve shown so far.
F1 Manager 2022 will be out sometime this summer (Q3) for the PS4, PS5, PC (Steam, Epic Games Store), Xbox One and Xbox Series X|S.