Race Strategy Guide

Planning for success on the track

In F1® Manager 2024 you’ll be spending a lot of your time guiding your team and developing a championship winning car, but race weekends are the critical moments when your hard work can turn into points for your team.

As Team Principal, preparation is just the beginning, and a race weekend is no time to rest on your laurels. You’ll have many choices to make and dilemmas to resolve as you move through Practice, Qualifying and the Race Day itself.

In this guide we’ll introduce the various elements that you’ll need to juggle as Team Principal over a race weekend and give tips to help craft the best strategy to win in F1® Manager 2024.

Basics of Race Strategy

Over the course of a race weekend, your activities will be broken down into pre-race and mid-race decisions which shape how your drivers and cars will behave on the track:

• Pre-race – before a session begins, whether it’s Practice, Qualifying or the Race Day itself, you’ll be able to set the approach you want your driver to take. This can include dictating the number of laps in Practice or their pit strategy on Race Day.
• Mid-race – once a session begins you can also make calls to either support or deviate from the strategy. This can include requesting your driver take an additional pit due to a weather change or instructing them to push more aggressively.

Across the entirety of a race weekend as Team Principal, you’ll have to manage the performance of your car, keeping a close eye on part wear, your usage of available tyres, fuel (on Race Day), tyre condition and compound use.

Before each session begins you can choose the starting tyres and fuel load for each car, along with adjusting the car setup and the parts in use. However, due to Parc Fermé rules, after Qualifying 1 you cannot change your car’s parts for those of a different design and you can only adjust front wing angle setup.

Learn more about building a race winning car in our car development and research guide.

Your strategic choices, both on and off the track, will have a significant impact on how your race weekend plays out. Play it smart and you could gain an upper hand over the competition. Make the wrong calls and you may not even make it to the finish line.

Informing Your Strategy

Before you reach a race weekend it’s important that you correctly prepare, otherwise you may find that you can’t deliver an optimal strategy.

Each circuit favours different car part stats and setups, so you should make sure you that you have the right parts to compete effectively. The Circuits menu will show you which parts are favoured for each track and will also give you some useful statistics on pit stop times, weather forecasts and the abrasiveness of the track.

While preparing well in advance is advised, before each race weekend begins your Sporting Director will also contact you with recommendations and points of interest for the upcoming circuit.

When heading into a race weekend you’ll also be asked to review your race targets, which outline your expectations for each of your cars and drivers. These will determine what your driver must do to receive a bonus and can also impact their overall mentality.

Meeting targets is beneficial for your drivers’ overall mentality and performance, but it will also carry a higher financial cost in the form of a bigger bonus. You may be forced to make the difficult call between keeping your drivers happy or keeping your chequebook full.

Depending on your sponsorship agreements, you may also have additional performance targets for the race. Along with any prize winnings, this can be an effective way to offset the costs of any bonuses – but this will also place even more strain on your drivers.

Practice Strategy

Practice sessions are an opportunity for your drivers to test their cars and their setups on the circuit ahead of the race itself.

Unsurprisingly, your focus for a Practice session is to maximise your driver’s preparedness and confidence for the race. This is done by improving 3 areas:

• Track acclimatisation – a driver becomes acclimatised to the track as they drive, learning how to best improve lap times based on the circuit’s unique conditions. The longer they drive without stopping during Practice sessions, the faster track acclimatisation increases.

  Track acclimatisation makes up a quarter of the max driver preparation that can be gained during Practice sessions.

• Car parts knowledge – the average of how well the driver has adjusted to all six car parts fitted to their car. The better they understand the car, the better their performance. A driver’s car part knowledge is permanent for each car part design and lasts between race weekends, so the longer a driver uses a specific part, the better their performance with it.

  Car parts knowledge makes up a quarter of the max driver preparation that can be gained during Practice sessions.

• Setup satisfaction – gained by adjusting the car setup to match the driver’s needs. Send your driver out on track and gather their feedback to try and find the right setup balance for each driver.

  Perfecting setup satisfaction amounts to half of the max potential driver preparation that can be gained during Practice.

It’s important to steadily and incrementally improve your performance for each of these factors across each of the Practice sessions.

Within Practice your primary focus should be on refining the car setup, while also minimising risk and wear of parts. When beginning Practice, your initial car setup will have a wide range to find improvements in, with your drivers providing more detailed feedback after each session. Luckily there is no limit to refuelling or pitting during a Practice session, so you should aim to keep your driver out on the track, at a steady pace, for as long as possible before returning to refuel.

During Practice, you can mostly take a hands-off approach and allow your drivers to complete as many circuits as possible – however, keep an eye on your parts wear and instruct your drivers to retire when you think they’ve had enough time. Familiarity with the track won’t mean much if a key part fails on Race Day.

The Practice sessions themselves can also be fully simulated, allowing you to focus on tweaking setups and parts between sessions.

Qualifying Strategy

The results of Qualifying will determine the starting grid on Race Day, making this the first real test of the race weekend. Pushing your hardest to secure prominent placement on the grid might be attractive, but once again you’ll need to be careful not to place too much strain on your car if you don’t want to face issues on Race Day.

When heading into Qualifying it’s a good idea to take a look at your competitors’ activity during Practice and keep in mind the conditions of the particular circuit you’ll be competing on. More downforce on circuits like Monaco will allow little opportunity for overtakes, placing a higher significance on Qualifying. Other circuits will see the starting grid quickly made irrelevant as drivers rapidly overtake.

As a format, Qualifying also favours different qualities in cars versus the heavier endurance of a Grand Prix race. If your car is geared more towards endurance and consistent performance, rather than shorter bursts of high speed, you may need to rule out your ability to compete effectively at Qualifying sessions and focus on your Race Day strategy.

Before heading out for your first Qualifying session you’ll have your final opportunity to make adjustments to your car parts and setup. This can be a good chance to make some final small tweaks, however large changes can be high risk unless you’re confident that you can make an improvement for the better and your driver will see real benefits.

Before Qualifying you will set a Run Plan for your drivers to follow which will defines the number of flying laps (opportunities to set the best lap time), whether they include additional cooldown laps to recharge their ERS and if they pack additional fuel into their car allowing more runs at the expense of more weight. The key focus here is to strike a balance between achieving the fastest possible lap times and the amount of time your cars need to be out on the track.

Qualifying sessions can also be fully simulated in F1® Manager 2024.

Race Day Strategy

Everything has led up to this moment, with your drivers’ confidence decided by Practice and their starting position determined by Qualifying. However, everything is still very much to play for, and a good race plan will be essential for victory.

Before hitting the track, you’ll now be able to set a specific race strategy for each of your drivers.

Planning a Race Strategy allows you to analyse your pre-race options, view the weather forecast and then set an approach to match different outcomes. Strategies are made up of individual stints, where you plan how long and how hard to push each tyre, when to pit and which tyre compound to switch to.

Your team will provide you with a data driven recommendation for every race, but as Team Principal you have full control over the final strategy and can edit, add or remove stints as you see fit.

When editing a strategy, you’ll be provided with data on when you can expect wear to result in a performance drop off and a projected estimated race time. While there is no guaranteed strategy for success, opening or closing on softs while minimising the number of pit stops is a general good rule of thumb.

Each Circuit you face will require a different plan of action if you want to find consistent success. Trust in the data and check the Circuit stats before the race to help inform your choices.

Race strategy is a powerful tool, but anything can happen in Formula 1®, and there will always be decisions to make on the spot during the race itself.

Once the race begins you can make calls for your drivers to follow, either in line with your Run Plan or to meet the changing conditions of the day. You can instruct your drivers to push harder, change pit times, change planned compound changes and more.

You can also set tactics for your drivers to follow which will determine how they approach other drivers and their team mates on the track, driving more aggressively or more defensively. Critically, this can be impacted by the driver’s overall confidence, so be sure your driver can meet your expectations if you tell them to push hard.

Finally, as the race goes on, you’ll need to monitor the performance of your car, keeping an eye out for wear or damage to any parts. Damaged or highly worn parts increase the chance of a mechanical failure occurring which could end your Race Day early, so it’ll be down to you to judge when to make an unscheduled pit for repairs or risk keeping the car out for longer and stick to your pre-race strategy.

New in F1® Manager 2024, you can also fully simulate Race Days, placing the onus on your team to handle these decisions and deliver a podium finish. However, with so much on the line and many on the spot decisions needed, you might want to keep such pivotal control in your own hands.

F1® Manager 2024 is Available Now!

There is no one strategy for success on race weekends. Preparing in advance, studying the circuit, listening to your team and making the most of Practice and Qualifying sessions will all set you up for success, but as Team Principal it’s down to you to realise your potential.

F1® Manager 2024 is available to buy now on Steam, Epic Games Store, PlayStation 5, PlayStation 4, Xbox Series X|S, Xbox One and Nintendo Switch.