The best F1 games of all time | FOS Future Lab

F1 Manager 24

We’d been waiting for a proper F1 management game for literally decades, and in 2022 we finally had our wishes granted when F1 Manager was launched on 30th August for consoles and PC. Since then, a new edition has been released every year, with gradual improvements being made with each iteration.

The third game in the series, F1 Manager 24 was the first to give players the chance to create their own team, for which they can design a livery, and compete on the grid alongside the ten established teams. This is the feature we’ve all been waiting for since the F1 Manager series was first revealed, and anyone who fancies themselves as an armchair Guenther Steiner will have an awful lot of fun with this as they forge their way towards the front of the grid.

F1 Manager 24 features a long list of drivers that you can sign up to your chosen team. It includes the current F1, Formula 2 and Formula 3 grids, as well as several reserve and test drivers associated with each of the F1 teams. The likes of Abbi Pulling, Maya Weug and Bianca Bustamante among several others are also representing the F1 Academy grid.

One of the several management decisions you’ll need to make while in charge of your team involves balancing the happiness of each member, including the drivers – this can have an effect on car performance, strategy and even driver contracts. You’ll also have an eye on sponsorships, the driver market and detailed oversight of your team’s performance over a race weekend, adjusting everything from pit strategy to tyre choice and the decision-making of your drivers.

This series is still very much in its infancy, and the system can get sterile once you’re into the rhythm of several championships, but there’s plenty of depth here to keep you interested for a good long while.

F1 Career Challenge (F1 Challenge 99-02)

F1 games have typically been focused on a single season of the sport, featuring the most recent drivers, teams, circuits, cars and regulations. But in 2003, after its license to create current F1 games came to an end, EA Sports published F1 Career Challenge, and ripped up the rulebook of what we thought was possible from an F1 game.

Covering all four seasons that EA had previously featured during its licensed run, from 1999-2002, the game had an authentic timeline that saw driver and team changes occur at the end of each season, and even the circuits change over time with new sponsorship hoardings. It was unlike anything we’d ever seen before, and gave F1 Career Challenge a much longer shelf life than its predecessors.

It also featured updated graphics and physics, which made it one of the more realistic racing titles on sale at the time, with a generally well-received sim racing feel. It’s obviously not aged tremendously well compared to more recent titles, but for its time, F1 Career Challenge was a game-changer.

To be able to accurately advance through four full seasons of F1, experiencing the downfall of the Tyrrell and Arrows teams alongside the birth of BAR and Toyota, was a great way to while away our childhood years.

F1

Before fully scanned and perfectly replicated race tracks and highly detailed car renders, the games of the 1980s and early ’90s left a little more to the imagination. F1 on the Sega Mega Drive was one such game, although it was at least officially licensed by the FIA, so could feature the names of real drivers and semi-recognisable track layouts, even if the scenery surrounding them was questionable.

It was one of the final F1 games to be released before the launch of the PlayStation, which brought with it new graphical capabilities, and as a result it’s generally considered one of the best racing games of its time, especially for the Sega console.

F1 doesn’t cover the entire season, it’s limited instead to 12 circuits, but Interlagos, Imola, Monaco, Silverstone, Hockenheim, Spa and Monza are all on the list. In the game you race for the fictional Domark team, named after the company that published the game, and you can compete in a truncated championship.

The gameplay itself is a little odd, given that the circuits are lined with impervious obstacles and bollards that will hinder your progress if you stray from the track itself, which makes the game far more challenging than many of its contemporaries. Before each session you can adjust your basic car setup with high, medium or low downforce settings, manual or auto transmission and hard, medium or soft tyres, although whether these actually make much of difference is questionable.

What is without question is how well the developers have captured the sense of speed that comes with driving an F1 car. You really do feel like you’re in a race with the sprites you share the track with, which makes F1 a genuinely exciting game to play, if a little primitive.

Grand Prix 2

You can’t have a list of the greatest F1 games ever without having something from Geoff Crammond on the list. Despite not being much of a motorsport fan at the start of his programming career, the former systems engineer for the defence industry tried his hand at developing a Formula 3 game in 1984. That game, Revs, would become the first stepping stone on Crammond’s path to forging an empire

While the original Formula 1 Grand Prix was a pioneering game, we’ve chosen to place Crammond’s second effort, Grand Prix 2, on this list because it defined an era of racing games that shaped the titles that we enjoy 30 years later. It’s generally considered among the best F1 games of all time for its officially licensed drivers, cars and circuits, but most of all its customisation options that allow players to adjust the gameplay to their own preferences and skill level. You can turn off all the aids if you want to, in which case Grand Prix 2 becomes a simulation that’s classes above its competition.

The game itself is an accurate representation of the 1994 season that allows you to play through all 16 rounds of the championship using a driver of your choice from that year’s grid. Ayrton Senna and Roland Ratzenberger are not included in the game following the tragic events of that season’s San Marino Grand Prix.

This was perhaps the first time in video game history that players could enjoy racing in an environment that closely resembled the real thing. It also featured things like real-time car failures, and crashes, which raised the immersion stakes further still. There’s no doubt the Grand Prix series laid the foundations for each and every F1 game that followed, and the progress was about to pick up serious steam.

Grand Prix World

Another game published by MicroProse, Grand Prix World was the third title in a series of F1 management games that launched throughout the 1990s. But while its two predecessors never quite set the world on fire with slightly claggy mechanics, it was a case of third time lucky as Grand Prix World set a new standard for what was possible from this genre.

An officially licensed title for the 1998 F1 season, this game had to take charge of one of the 11 existing teams on the grid and manage their progress to eventually win the world championship. Among the tweaks made to Grand Prix World were some much needed algorithm changes which made for a more realistic experience. You could no longer storm to the top of the standings as Arrows without investing a whole lot of time and effort into turning them into a winning team.

But it’s the management aspects of this game that truly sets it apart from the rest, and arguably still maintains its place as the best motorsport management game of all time. The way you can organise budgets between departments, prioritise developments – which can be protested by other teams, or making the bold move to instigate a change to your driver line-up or technical staff give this game an awful lot of depth that keeps it interesting for hours on end. It forces you to think of the bigger picture, and make decisions that may take a season or more to bear fruit.

You can manage your drivers’ mindsets, but not just when it comes to racing their competitors, but also how hard they push the car, and of course have final say on the details of car setup and race strategy. After the success of this title, it’s crazy to think it would be so long before we had a modern F1 management game to play.

Formula 1 97

The dawn of the console introduced a whole new era of F1 games that began with Formula 1 in 1996. Then a year later Formula 1 97 was launched, and it hastily changed the complexion of F1 games forever.

A graphical powerhouse of its era, Formula 1 97 stunned players and critics alike with its faultless game engine that maintained a stoic 25fps even when at busy moments like race starts. Although now we may look back and find the visuals difficult to stomach, they were state of the art when this game was released.

The game is an officially licensed game that depicts the 1997 F1 season, featuring every team and driver bar Jacques Villeneuve, whose likeness was omitted after copyright issues, and the ill-fated Lola team who never actually made it onto the grid. In Grand Prix mode you can take part in an entire grand prix weekend including practice, qualifying and the race, or you can contest an entire 16-race world championship.

The handling is challenging and realistic for its time, and you can reap big rewards for spending time honing your driving style. Perhaps most impressive is the AI, which showcases several different personality traits that make the racing itself unpredictable and exciting. Things like car damage and tyre wear are also fundamental aspects of the gameplay, and you do need to actually think about your strategy before preparing for the lights to go out.

There’s an Arcade mode as well, which makes the grass a little less treacherous, and generally delivers a more relaxed playing experience for those who would rather not stress about the perils of oversteer and understeer.

F1 2010

It would be a long time before F1 games experienced another step change comparable to that of Formula 1 97. The next time it felt as though the bar had been raised substantially was when Codemasters took up the mantle in 2009 to try its hand at developing the next big F1 title. Following its experimental F1 2009 that launched on the PSP and Nintendo Wii, its first major entry arrived in 2010 for PS3, Xbox 360 and PC.

Codemasters pulled out all the stops with F1 2010 to create the most realistic and immersive F1 game of all time, and actually to this day we still believe that this original effort remains one of the best all of these years later.

With career mode, F1 2010 puts you in the shoes of an up-and-coming driver who has signed for a team of your choice, and features a stunning presentation that houses the main menu inside your motorhome. Over the course of the season, you interact with your agent, race engineer and the media to negotiate contracts, manage car development and respond to questions about your and your team’s performance. For the first time, car evolution carried over from one season to the next, so it’s possible that you can begin your career with the rather awful Hispania team and drag them to the top of the standings over the course of three, five or seven years.

The racing itself was better than ever, too. Dynamic track and weather conditions meant the surface would evolve over the course of a session or weekend. Heading out for first practice, the track is ‘green’ and yielding low grip, but by the time you cross the finish line on Sunday it will be strewn with marbles. Should it rain, puddles will begin to form around the circuit, but as it begins to dry, cars will clear the water in real time, and eventually begin to carve a dry line that offers more grip.

All of this really did change the landscape of F1 games at the time, and opened our eyes to what we’d been missing through the previous decade of rather stagnant rinse and repeats.

F1 2013 - PC, Xbox 360, PS3

Codemasters have been building F1 games for 11 years now, and it's pretty safe to say they’ve absolutely nailed it with their recent offerings. Not that that was always the case, however, and you could certainly call the series a rollercoaster of quality. F1 2013 was the follow-up to a rather lacklustre F1 2012. There wasn’t much wrong with the previous offering, it was just a bit… well, boring. Codies pulled it out of the bag for the sequel, giving F1 fans their first opportunity at driving cars and tracks from yesteryear. Largely focussed on the late ‘80s, if you didn’t want the sound of screaming V8s, something many would be desperate to hear again these days, you could swap out for the growling DFV. They even threw in a filter and custom graphics to enhance the classic car experience, a nice touch that many appreciated. The classic cars were a welcome addition, and provided a break from the annoying, yet very accurate, extremely high tyre wear from the 2013 cars.

F1 2020 – PC, Xbox One, PS4

The latest edition from Codemasters F1 2020 unsurprisingly makes it on the list as you would imagine that the most recent game with the most up-to-date tech is a shoo-in. That’s not always the case, but the features included in this game more than make it relevant as one of the best F1 offerings on the market. Expanding from F1 2019’s hugely popular decision to include F2 cars (which provided a much better racing experience than the F1 cars), Codemasters added in a new, and much welcomed feature called “My Team”. Here you created your own 12^th team to join the F1 entry list. You chose who to purchase engine from, and of course the higher the price, the better the engine. But splash out on your engine and you lose money for your second driver, who you originally pick from the 2019 Formula 2 entry list. Starting at the bottom, you would then have to utilise the R&D, which has become a hugely expanded part of Codemasters’ career modes after the last few years, to try and work your way up and see your team go from back row minnows to World Constructors Champions.

F1 Race Stars – PC, PS3, Xbox 360

It’s not all perfectly simulated experiences in the world of F1 gaming. In 2012 Codemasters decided to release a Mario Kart-esque game to their repertoire alongside their sim-heavy series. Featuring every car and driver from the 2012 season, plus two additional fictional teams with female drivers, players competed on tracks loosely based on the real life circuits for their countries. For example, Silverstone only really features a cartoon version of the start finish straight, before the cars head down a British village and get snapped by a speed camera before heading through a car factory – a nod to the number of teams based close by. Finally the cars race across a working airfield, another reference to Silverstone’s past, before rejoining the circuit and starting over again. Other examples include the Ferrari Rossa roller coaster on the Abu Dhabi track and driving across an American Football field at Austin. With a mixture of power-ups and weapons, much like the other kart racers it was based on, this was definitely one for the casual gamer, and the younger generation. Any of the more serious F1 fans saying it was a waste of time are just kidding themselves. It was a lot of fun.

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