With my underwhelming feelings on F1 Manager 2024’s Create A Team mode, I’m finding my enjoyment is turning to other F1 management games from smaller developers. Formula Racing Manager is the latest game in the sub genre that takes a uniquely streamlined approach. The entirely menu based game, which comes with a full name and stat editor, is about building a legacy as quickly as possible. You can clear a season in 20 minutes!
At the start of each game you’ll pick a team to start with. Each team has a starting budget and a collection of facilities that generate cash, sponsorship power, research and development points for upgrades and other areas for car and staff development. You can absolutely climb the ranks with the lowest rank team over time but it will take longer and require careful investment to do it. Once you’ve chosen a team, you’ll then choose six contracts for the year ahead that determine your cars starting stats for the year ahead. Engine, gearbox, front and rear wings, sidepods and brakes all come with individual ranks for the parts of the car they affect and your choices will stilt a cars stats in certain directions. Maybe you ‘ll make an all rounder, or you could prioritise tyre wear or top speed. It is up to you – just stay within budget.
A race season takes place over 16 races and 16 weeks. Before a race you can check your cars stats compared to the other teams and see where you rank. This helps you choose what to invest development points on. When the race occurs, you won’t see any of it happen – everything is simulated with the race result popping up on screen and some minor feedback on some drivers are given. Before you start the race you have four options for how you’d like to spend practice though. This can be improving your race pace for that specific race, or it could be generating research points for specific car parts. You can also choose between a cautious, risky or wild race strategy but these choices lack context since you don’t see anything about what happens. I felt like the game was spinning a roulette wheel as to how it would treat me.
The research points can be spent between races on developing upgrades. If you want to upgrade your engine, you’ll generate the points and then enter an RNG card based level up system. Here you are offered three choices at random to choose from like a safe but small performance boost, halving the cost, or a big bonus upgrade that has a 20% chance of being discovered as illegal, resulting in having the part removed. If you’ve saved enough points you can get multiple traits added to an upgrade and then develop it to arrive in a few races time. It is a neat system that feels fast and engaging.
Sponsorship is also well developed too. Each sponsor is rated between 1-5 stars with their money potential but you aren’t sure exactly what they’ll offer until you are further into pursuing them. Allocating your commercial manager’s time to them will progress a meter over multiple weeks and you’ll be able to see a rival team that is also courting the sponsor. You have to decide who to chase and then beat the other team to contract signing but each sponsor can surprise you with their offer. They all offer a base payment and a performance bonus for reaching a certain position. Some offer lots of base money and little bonus but many also offer zero base money and big but potentially risky bonuses if you don’t think you can meet their target position regularly. Its a well balanced system that works well.
Contracts for drivers and tech staff initially works well, with you getting five chances to negotiate a starting offer to where you want it to be. You can lower/raise the salary or length of the contract for example. This needs a little rebalancing though as I managed to ensure each staff member signed a deal with slightly less salary than the previous contract. Don’t give the real world ideas! I needed to initially too as if you get into a run of poor sponsorship deals, big overheads from your facilities and a lack of TV money, you can find your team running at a loss over time. Thankfully as the big 6 contracts are renegotiated yearly, you can readjust your contracts for a lower performance on a smaller budget package. You can go bankrupt for being in negative finance for 4 weeks and if that happens a sponsor can buy out the team. When this happens you can rebrand your team colour but all your facilities drop to level 1 performance (the lowest) and you get given 20 million to keep afloat for the year. You can still recover from this over time but what I loved was that other teams rebranded to engine names, tyre names or lead sponsors over the seasons so it felt like a very dynamic world.
Those little legacy touches are found in different areas of Formula Racing Manager. F2 and F3 series are present and other drivers go off to race Le Mans 24hr and Indycar (well all their rebranded equivalents) and drivers move around quite freely – the market doesn’t feel static. Drivers retire and stay in the history books for you to look back on. Their junior versions are then born and start off back in F3 again. I really like the cyclic nature of the driver and staff market and that history is valued.
Formula Racing Manager is fascinating because its a racing management game where you never see a race. In many ways, the hands off nature to racing does remove you from feeling connected to the results and feeling like you have made an impact. This feels like an RNG spreadsheet game and I wished sometimes there would be the tiniest race script available to flesh out what happened. The flipside is that decisions are fast, results come quickly and a season takes 15-20 minutes. That means you can reach 2040 or 2080 in hours and create a massive legacy of battles and rivals. That unique approach to speeding through races gives a uniquely approachable take on motorsport management. I enjoyed it but it won’t be for everyone. Just know going in that this is about the menus and the legacy you create at pace and you’ll have a great time. I personally ended up diving into the game editor and creating various time periods and enjoyed speed running them to see the funny results and alternative histories play out too. A great solo dev approach to F1 styled management.
Review copy provided by the developer. Formula Racing Manager is out now on Steam.
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