If last season's Formula One was all about driving, this year is all about management. Gone are the days when Lewis and Max fought fiercely from corner to corner on the pavement, pushing each other into the run-off area and exchanging the most insincere handshakes in the room in front of the podium like a Premier League dugout. 2022 has replaced the history-making, headline-grabbing, on-track duels with a season marked by inexplicable management incompetence. Instead of a historic, headline-grabbing, on-track duel, 2022 was a season marked by inexplicable management incompetence. Bad news for everyone except Max Verstappen and Frontier Development. [When you see the throttle pedal loose on Leclerc's Ferrari five laps from victory at the Austrian Grand Prix, or yell at Mercedes' tire strategy during the Xantphault safety car, it's natural to think they could do better." Get out, you fools." You're not telling anyone." Let me blink first."

Well, now is your chance to find out exactly how our managerial incompetence compares to the rest of the grid. Frontier Developments, an F1 management sim in its debut, conveys both the Sunday hand-wringing reactivity of the sport and the frantic developmental races that take place in between.

As the boss of the team, you are in charge of everything from contracting the drivers to drive the cars to designing and manufacturing the components of the cars. On race day, the pit crews run under your direction, and even the amount of prize money paid by sponsors depends on the promises you make to them before the race weekend. Oddly enough, you are even involved in the mechanical setup of each car. This maverick megalomaniac

has a nice rhythm to it: a slow, therapeutic progression through email inboxes and front wing design menus, and an adrenaline rush on race day as you watch the action on the track in the 3D engine.Football Manager's menu and engine switching, or Civ's transition from peacetime contemplation to wartime strategy. Grand plans are hatched in wind tunnels, in driver contract negotiations and balance sheets. But it is on the pavement that it comes to fruition. And it is the ticking sound of progress that negotiates with itself in the dead of night, "Just one more race. What position on the grid will this new underfloor put me in?

Mercedes is benefiting from a completely unproven and unqualified new team boss in my playthrough. Toto Wolff" Pfft. He only has seven constructors' titles and a successful career in investment banking. Get off your ass and get out already. Now Phil Iwanique is in charge of the mouse clicks and rebuilding this sinking ship. [He will push for an updated aero package for the entire car, including chassis, front wing, rear wing, underfloor, sidepods, and a new suspension design. Rushing to design and manufacture all these components at huge expense to fit new parts to the car and close the performance gap with Red Bull and Ferrari as quickly as possible, sacrificing bank balance and XP gains. After all, if Lewis Hamilton can't win sitting in an F1 car, it's the car's fault.

Such an aggressive upgrade strategy is a luxury allowed only to the top three teams. In the middle of the season, budgets become tighter and unnecessary funds cannot be invested in hasty upgrades. And even when parts do arrive, they are likely to be conceived and manufactured in low-quality facilities and therefore unlikely to improve performance. Even more disastrously, the sponsors will pay little in dividends. If you wonder why Williams and Haas don't build better cars in real life, try playing a little "F1 Manager 2022."

In real life sports, the satisfaction of righting wrongs, such as a favorite driver not winning or a team missing out on a one-two finish every weekend due to rampant organizational incompetence, can only come when the simulation is compelling enough. In F1 Manager, this is accomplished beautifully by combining a moderate level of difficulty with smart production elements, such as voice clips of actual team radios. If teams and drivers felt like a series of codes, or if the order of the grid was changed too easily, the bubble would burst. It won't and it doesn't.

Despite the hasty aero upgrades for the Silver Arrows, it will take more than half the season before they can even think about winning a race or winning a pole at a dominant pace. In the meantime, all we can hope for is weather and a safety car.

Nevertheless, overseeing a race is not a passive experience. A lot of micromanagement is in your hands: driver pace, fuel consumption, ERS deployment, pit strategy, etc. Manually managing all of these things corner by corner gives you the same feeling as if you were driving the car yourself. You can use these controls to empower the driver in overtaking, but you can't push Williams to the podium with just the right placement of fuel and ERS. To really turn heads, they need the luck from the aforementioned wet weather and crashes.

And it is in the more unpredictable dimensions of the sport that F1 Manager 2022 will reveal itself to be an inexperienced rookie rather than a wily old rival. Crashes, safety cars, and sudden downpours should be the most spectacular and important moments in an F1 Manager's season, opportunities where decisive strategic decisions take precedence over obvious performances.

Crashes, however, are never depicted in detail; cars simply come to a halt on the track or plunge into gravel traps. The visual spectacle is not here yet. Also, in wet conditions, the track gets wet at a believable rate, but the AI is usually a bit too group minded, resulting in no interesting scenarios. The same goes for safety car and VSC scenarios. I have yet to see a driver choose to make an unscheduled pit stop to switch to a fresh soft compound, as Red Bull did at the recent Zandvoort race or, more famously, at last year's Abu Dhabi race, in my time with the game.

In such scenarios you can make up a little ground and there is certainly a sense of urgency and adrenaline when it happens. After a while, however, it becomes clear that the mood is generally elevated because of anticipation of what could happen, rather than what does. Pit stops are rarely reversed or reactive pit stops are made, and as a result, many reactive decisions are not forced.

Where the AI really disappoints in this endeavor, however, is in the cockpit. When you're 40 laps ahead of Valtteri Bottas in Monaco, it's hard to believe that you're looking at seven-time champion Lewis Hamilton when you tell him what to do with his tires, fuel, and ERS. And the time lost trying to pass backmarkers who seem neither willing nor able to get in your way is unforgivable. George Russell once lost 10 seconds to Latifi. There is no clever pit strategy to counter that one.

In the next installment, which will surely come, AI behavior should be the focus of the frontier. For now, AI is responsible for breaking the illusion. But even with a grid full of morons, "F1 Manager 2022" consistently delivers thrilling races.

Lewis took his first win of the season at Spa after a very late start, and George Russell took his first career top step in a strange, rainy Miami race. But two seasons on, and despite more than $50 million spent on upgrades, Red Bull still has the edge in terms of pace. I wish I could do the same. You don't want to win a scientific victory in the Civ before we enter the classic era.

Frontier would be proud of this well judged foundational release in what will be a long-lived series. In a perfect world, crashed cars would shatter into pieces of carbon fiber, and drivers Verstappen and Ricciardo would be recognizable by their driving style as well as their livery. As it stands, all the fundamentals are in place and ready for a new foundation on which to build.

Ironically, that foundation has already been in place for several years. The game owes a huge debt to Playsport Games' 2017 title, Motorsport Manager, which formed a very comprehensive blueprint for how a modern racing management sim should play. That blueprint is observed almost to the millimeter, down to the way Frontier refines the setup of the car throughout the free practice sessions. But the licensing and detailed racing visuals are enough to distinguish this new game, and F1 Manager 2022 makes full use of its shining official license in all areas, creating a compelling ecosystem that evolves with each season."