If you knew anything about F1 24 before playing it, the handling has changed due to the partnership between EA and World Champion Max Verstappen to be more “Authentic.” That’s all I’d heard as we waited for the code fairies to come down from their trees and properly process some paperwork. That covers the newest feature and the reason this review is “late,” let’s get to the other major thing about F1 24 so we can get to talking about it. It is practically the same game as F1 23 but without that story mode which I’m sure people are still bumping their gums at.

To be fair to EA, which is like saying being fair to a rabid dog as it sits at the full extension of its chain inches from freshly cooked sausages, there does need to be a rest period between jamming the stories in. The trouble is finding the thing to replace it in the intervening year. There is a new Challenge Career mode, and to hyperextend your will to live, Sky Sports UK’s Natalie Pinkham explains in excruciating detail the great new way to waste your time with the returning F1 World and the new currency in an asynchronous team-based mode.

Titled Fanzone, this year you can pick your favorite team and favorite driver to compete against other dullards in asynchronous points gathering. Each player for each team passively generating points for doing activities in the F1 World section, which still has all the Panini sticker book-like Compendium nonsense, as well as the F1 World Car and garage guff. If I wasn’t busier than Max during a virtual 24-hour Nurburgring race and F1 race weekend, maybe I’d care more about it, but I’d also need to be beaten around the head with sticks first. Dismantling is still slow and I hate the wannabe live service nonsense.

With that out of the way, I’m sure I am about to be beaten to death with those sticks as I don’t hate the new handling system for F1 24. With track geometry redone and the tire models reshaped to be more “realistic” to Max’s understanding, a lot of people have come out to claim the end of the universe is coming and how Jesus will make those who defy this one person be sent to hell, or as I believe it is commonly known, Qatar. It is a change so the internet is up in arms, and to a degree I have my gripes with the handling too.

One of the biggest changes to this year’s handling is arguably the addition of Engine Braking, a common thing you’ll hear about in F1 commentary and post-session interviews. Engine Braking is the braking and recovery of energy that comes naturally from being off the throttle or simply trying to slow the car down. The way Engine Braking is implemented in F1 24 is difficult to describe without expletives. On-throttle it is fine, off-throttle it is fine, applying throttle on the apex of a corner? I want to make like Lewis to Max in Copse and “yeet” someone into a barrier.

Setting Engine Braking to zero and getting a decent base car setup down, something drivable but quick, somewhat “removes” a large number of the complaints I’d say are to be had with F1 24’s handling. Given Codemasters and EA have been patching the handling a lot since release, I think there is plenty to be said about finding that baseline in the first place. Though, it can be a bit more flight-er, a bit more on edge at times, I guess even if you’ve got the whole traction thing down, you could still have moments where you need to pick the car back up mid-spin.

If you’re looking for something that’s consistently stable, having no to little chance of a moment, then yeah F1 24’s handling is terrible. That constant need to scoop up the car from a slide, to try desperately to keep the car on track in the damp (wet can get in the bin), is more exciting than a car that feels constantly on rails. Am I saying F1 24’s handling is better than F1 23? No, not even close. We were all comfortable with F1 23’s handling because (in the broad strokes) it was F1 2019–22’s handling.

That said, with the reworked handling and track geometry, we also have a reworked tire model supposedly. A bit more “realistic” in the sense you’ll be complaining like Lewis after a couple of laps, the drop-off and understeer can be rather severe. I’ve found one of the best solutions to the handling and tire drop-off is to turn up your sensitivity a little bit more alongside that stable baseline to work from. Otherwise, it can be difficult to get the car turned, especially in the hairpins; China (making its return), Spain, Monaco, Canada (less so), Hungary, Spa, Singapore, and Texas.

After you’ve scooped up the car from the barriers a couple of times, got a decent set-up under you, and found the ability to push the car to its limits, there is a good and fun system to sometimes fight with. It is a bit more difficult to talk about the minute-to-minute gameplay as I’ve done that countless times, it is a racing game you are going to (to put it lightly) make car go vroom. You don’t need a business accounting degree or several hundred PhDs in engineering, it is three peddles, a wheel, and a couple of buttons to change ERS, brake bias, differential, and pitstop requests. Oh, and the radio.

There is, however, a change to the career mode in smaller ways. Deciding this year of all years to replace K-Mag, I was taking the championship fight to Max in the American-owned and Japanese-run Haas. Yes, even signing after Gunther departed. Though signing this year is a major part of the season as a whole: As a new driver from F2 or an established driver remaining with the team, you are setting a goal to beat your teammate. Not just in the broad strokes but in the small print of your contract too.

As we’ve seen in recent years, each driver is assigned a rating based on their pace, on-track antics (that’s Stroll binned), general experience, and something called focus. All feeding into an overall. This overall rating determines your success as a driver comparably to your teammate which is your target. Points don’t matter, just beating your teammate it seems. Nonetheless, if you’re half decent at gaining points for your first team which only offers you a 1 season contract, others might come calling. Ahh yes, the French tractor and the only Mercedes-powered car not in the top 5.

It somewhat feeds into a more intrateam battle than the points thing, especially if you are in a back-marker team. This alongside your teammate contributing to team upgrades offers something a bit more competitive across the board. However, despite my blasé attitude to talking about the minute-to-minute gameplay or rather wheel-to-wheel racing, there is something new in there too. Depending on where you are in the pack and how well you manage everything in and outside the car, the bloke you keep telling to shut up with a few more expletives has a reason to talk more.

When you are using too much fuel or too little, your ERS is too low, your lap times are starting to lag or you just need a reminder it is a race, Marc Priestley will say something. For his sake, I hope it isn’t in the corners or the traction zones. Though what is said in this case I like. Labeled objectives, it seems there is someone at EA listening to me when I’ve said the race engineer should be telling us a target lap time, similar to that of the often abused Gianpiero Lambiase and Brad Joyce, or Nico’s engineer Gary Gannon.

He isn’t yapping every lap, and in fact, during a sprint in Austria, I did a whole race without him giving me a single objective. Nonetheless, when in a fight with Lando, Charles, Carlos, or Max, it can be helpful to get a little bit more engineering from the engineer trying to make me go faster. Too bad the suggested “put in a quick one for me” laps are about three seconds plus off the pace or that we should be conserving fuel at the race start while I’m mid-battle with Norris up the hill to Ams Ag/Remus and down again into Rauch.

The career mode finally has something going for it that has been missing for a while now, actually pitting you against your teammate or you’ll lose your seat and a race engineer that’s paying attention. It isn’t a complete face-lift and going to convert the people who get the titles to play online and ruin everyone else’s fun of actually trying to race. However, it is something that breathes a little more life into a portion of the game that needed something to stop it from feeling stale after several years of being fairly similar.

Let’s talk about the new Challenge Careers, a weekly challenge that changes from time to time, begging you to drive for certain teams you normally wouldn’t in races that are quite short. Sounds like something I praised F1 23 for last year, right? Well, the difference is that you’re also qualifying and doing practice, moreover, you are setting your difficulty. Though unlike the normal career mode difficulty settings this is a broad-tiered system where “normal” can be 55-85 on the sliding scale of difficulty.

The reason I say this is a “problem” or a grievance is that much like the Fanzone thing, this Challenge mode is a points-gathering system against other players. Points gathering which is based on completing practice programs in the practice sessions, qualifying, and the race. Say you do a 15-lap race and qualify for it, putting it on pole and beating out the other drivers comfortably. Where’s the fun? At least with the normal drivers/team career modes, you can shift the difficulty a little bit as you grow as a driver and skip sessions without feeling penalized for it. Here, not so much.

Thankfully they are short challenges, but all the same, I don’t care. Other people being boring enough to sit through practice sessions that are boring for races that aren’t always interesting isn’t fun. If I wanted to get in a measuring contest with random people on the internet I’d start a swearing competition to see who could be the best swearer – I have the advantage in that. Where Fanzone and Challenge Careers fall for me is the fact I hate people. I didn’t stutter, you read it correctly, I find other people contemptible and would rather them many miles away from me at all times.

That said, I did attempt to join a multiplayer session on a couple of occasions, and for whatever reason F1 24 couldn’t find one for the life of itself. I think the “Mixed” reviews on Steam are a banner to explain why that might be, as the many who shout about the handling might also be the folks who would normally be playing online. However, as a result of their lack of interest in a less-than-perfect handling system don’t want to bother cutting corners and shouting rude words in open lobbies.

Being a PC release in 2024, F1 24 does have its problems. In fact, I wanted to do a decent bit of coverage for the VR portion of F1 24 since I got a good few hours out of last year’s title later in the year doing that very thing. However, despite running the same hardware as the previous title, the performance of F1 24 in VR is shocking, to say the least. Running anywhere between the highest of high to the lowest of low settings, all I kept getting was a constant and stable 45 frames per second. Not looking to fill my headset with vomit, that idea was binned.

Nonetheless, the performance of a standard PC running a dual monitor set-up, reaching a resolution of 3840 by 1080P, most of the time I’d have a constant 60FPS. I say mostly because despite being pretty solid, Monaco tanked the frame rate quite significantly and occasionally I’d see a random drop. Maybe I’m being a conspiracy theorist here, but the addition of EA’s anti-cheat has certainly dropped my start-up performance for F1 24 and I’m guessing its occasional checks in with servers might be doing the same to normal offline gameplay.

Fiddling around with some settings can minimize it, but I have to say that it hasn’t stopped the occasional sudden drop, sometimes below 50. The anti-cheat also sometimes causes F1 24 not to boot at all, even forgetting to pop up an error message. Maybe that one isn’t the fault of the anti-cheat affected start-up, but I’ve had several crashes to my desktop during my nearly 70 hours this year. Some were in the middle of gameplay, some were on the start-up, and some were even before the anti-cheat loading screen thing was supposed to go away.

That isn’t the only technical problem I’ve had. Everyone and their cousin have reported the fact the reworked track geometry has been a little rough this year, with T13 at Circuit de Barcelona-Catalunya turning this upside-down carbon fiber plane on wheels into an actual plane. Sure, I’ve seen that as a problem, but I’ve also seen something that may be contributing to the handling woes everyone is seemingly having, or maybe not because it is a bug.

For some mad reason after realizing the warning that an engine component was on its last legs in Canada, I noticed the car was lurching a bit in the corner entry. It took a few moments to realize what was going on, but I thought “Oh, maybe this has to do with the gearbox issue I’m having,” that being the component that was heavily worn after 7 races. Nope! As it turned out braking and steering assist were engaging despite being switched right off within 3 minutes of initially starting F1 24 this year.

Better still, this hasn’t been a one-off situation. Rather significantly it has kept happening at almost every track since I was able to notice and diagnose it. The quickest and easiest fix is to go into the setting and switch it off and on again a couple of times. I know I sound like tech support for an OAP, but that’s really been the solution that’s been working for me. Otherwise, bugs have been rare or patched during the time I’ve been writing.

Unlike the rest of the internet, I’ve not decided the world is coming to an end because the handling in a game has changed a bit and I have to make rage-bait YouTube videos about it. As I’ve said the system in place isn’t perfect, far from it. I think there is a step in a direction being made, but honestly, I don’t know in which way or if it is the only metaphorical step.

When it works, I like the playfulness and sometimes skittishness to remind you how powerful yet delicate an F1 car is, but to get to that point you need to do a bit of work on the car setup side. F1 24 isn’t as plug-in-play as maybe its previous examples have been. Some would call that a step in the right direction, others might argue the opposite. Following last year’s near-perfect example of both handling for some but also the Braking Point story too, F1 24 had a lot to do to make up for that.

Ultimately, F1 24 is F1 23 with the story mode and established handling ripped out, only to be replaced with a controversial handling system and some asynchronous points-gathering games that aren’t fun. Thankfully one of them is passive as you play anyway, but that’s not the point. After a bit of frustration due to bugs and getting to grips with the handling, I like F1 24 enough. I’d have preferred to have a viable VR option, stable performance, and maybe none of this anti-cheat nonsense negatively impacting my experience. I guess we can’t have everything, I’ll settle for an interesting season of F1 and an alright game alongside it.

A PC review copy of F1 24 was provided by Electronic Arts for this review.

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F1 24

$69.99

7.5

Score

7.5/10

Pros

• Fun wheel-to-wheel racing.
• Improvements to career modes, in races and out.

Cons

• Dull replacements for Braking Point.
• Occasional performance dips and troubled bugs.
• VR performance is sickening.