SMOOTH OPERATOR

Creating a team in F1 2020 brings together a decade of evolution.

- Justin Towell

Being an F1 driver must mean a lot of weight to carry on your shoulders. When thousands of hours have been poured into crafting your race car, imagine having to face your boss after shoving it in the wall on lap one. Well… what if you are the boss? F1 2020 lets you be driver and manager of your own team, so you can ignore your own inadequacy, and instead punish disgruntled aerodynamic staff by closing their R&D department.

The F1 series has offered comparable depth in its career mode for a few years now, but creating and managing your own team really does make a difference to the emotional attachment you’ll feel. From press interview answers and sponsor choice to how you fill the new calendar with off-track events, everything fits together with existing systems to create a cohesive whole. But most brilliantly, everything eventually comes back to how you drive the car, which is of course paramount in what is still very much an action-packed racing game.

Of course, it’s ‘action’ in the modern F1 sense of the word, and while there are moments of genuine edge-of-your-bucket-seat excitement as your rival exits the pits right beside you into Turn 1, there are also countless regulations to follow and necessary management of components’ lifespan that sap some of the excitement, unless you understand the tactical possibilities, in which case it’s a more cerebral experience than any other racing game you could mention.