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

• 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,

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.