The age of cigarettes and cigars clouding the paddock, champagne being more than sparkling water at some races, and just before James Hunt would come and shag everything with legs. The “golden” age of F1 is something some fans fawn over to the point that they trip over their bottom lip. Art of Rally developer Funselektor Labs and Hell is Others developer Strelka Games’ Golden Lap does a better job than many say F1 Manager [enter year] has ever done at capturing the spirit of managing a Formula 1/open wheel racing team. Less extravagant than Frontier’s title and a lot simpler than Sports Interactive’s Football Manager, Golden Lap hopes for pole position.

As I noted in my preview a few months ago with the Steam Next Fest demo, Golden Lap is stripped down to little more than a couple of bits of UI and a track map. There are no fancy 3D models, and quite frankly for the age the game aims to replicate, you’ll be lucky if you have any serious understanding of aerodynamics. I say this, but given Golden Lap is F1 in all but name, there are some “legal distinctions.” Ferrari is a play on Clay Regazzoni “Ezzolini,” Lotus is “Chapman,” and McLaren and Brabham seem to have merged into LaBrahn.

Set in the dark year of 1970, you take command of one of ten teams. From there you are given a budget to hire two drivers, an Adrian Newey, and if you’re like Aston Martin you’ll hire Seymour Cox as team principal. Or the Americanized “crew chief.” From there, with only three pounds fifty to your name, the hopes of a drivers and constructors championship lay on chance and strategy. Simple strategy mind you, but it’s there. For the most part, it is watching the timing sheet, making decisions, and hoping your little dot going around in circles isn’t doing a Jean-Pierre Jarier, if Hunt is to be believed.

Generally speaking, the preview covered most of the gameplay you’ll experience, just now there are multiple seasons instead of single seasons with teams over shortened calendars. Over ten races your rag-tag team made up of whatever the simplified budget will allow for, with the occasional upgrade to the car, allow you to chase gold. I may even argue the teams reflect that of modern F1 rather than the 1970 season and beyond. There is a US-based team in 10th, a French tractor manufacturer, and lots of teams based in the UK, the latter is true of the time as well.

Each race weekend is also simplified down to two sessions: A practice-qualifying session to tune the car and set the fastest lap for pole position, and the race itself. Similar to the demo, qualifying sees you sending your two drivers out on whatever tires are deemed fit for purpose and playing a tuning minigame from their individual knowledge units. Each hot lap in qualifying provides you with several units to spend tuning the car to make it go even faster on the next lap. I keep saying it because it is true, this is all simplified and designed to reflect similar ideas to what you’d do as a driver in the F1 games.

There is, however, a small addition to the gameplay for the races. Previously you’d send drivers out on their new tires, leaning into them a little more to get them up to temp. At least that’s the theory I’ve come to in my head. With a slight UI change, having your star drivers going out there and driving their Faux-rrari like they stole it might lead to worse than tires falling to bits. If the driver is pushing too hard for too long, they have a small gauge now next to their name, and the higher it gets the more likely they are going to do a Lance Stroll.

This only happens with the tires for some reason, as the high engine usage only burns the go-fast juice a little more. Though this isn’t the only addition. With full championships (well, 10 races anyway) on offer you might end up doing something more sensible than wasting most of your budget on two great drivers. You might hire a decent driver and an American/Canadian, so “papaya rules” might not be the best course of action. For the benefit of my editor or those not criminally insane, this was just a recent coded message about team orders.

Do you plan on doing a Lawrence Stroll, buying a seat for your son then buying another Spanish son? Well, you can tell one driver to sit behind another like you are James Vowels, an act best described early in the season as (to keep it civil) “some nonsense.” Just as I think not employing team orders over halfway through the season while you have (realistically) one driver in contention for the championship as, “who’s on meth? The Italian or the American.” Given how volatile F1 is these days, address the hate to the usual place, my bin.

Back to Golden Lap without thinly veiled comments on the current season though, those multi-year seasons can be vital to lower-end teams, provided you manage your drivers and strategy right. However, if you’re playing as the top-tier teams such as Ezzolini, LaBrahn, and Chapman, these team orders don’t have the same weight as they might lower down the order. Maybe I’m comparing the two in my head as I play both properly for the first time, but you have the likes of Football Manager now emphasizing player mentality. Drivers in Golden Lap don’t really complain about Who’s on first, What’s on second, and I Don’t Know on third.

You can employ team orders without much backlash from the drivers in contention for the championship. Same with upgrades and new parts. In my first season with Ezzolini, I hired two pretty good drivers. An Austrian (Mach) and an American (Moretti), with the latter seemingly having some better stats, so of course I put everything behind him, in theory. In practice/qualifying he’d drive over What in a great display of vehicular homicide, but the Austrian was just a bit better at his game of Carmageddon for this Abbott and Costello joke to properly work.

Despite giving team orders for the former to play second fiddle, Mach led the championship by single digits going into the final race of the season. Both drivers comfortably led the championship and the constructor’s championship wrapped up after 6 or so races. It was level pegging for both and I was letting the reigns off for the two to battle, but despite having the mechanically better car, Moretti started on pole position with Mach in 5th off the line. With only 7 points in it pre-race, Mach won despite team orders earlier in the season, the car’s performance, and despite everything I tried to do.

All without a grumble or complaint. He was ready to sign for a second season with the team at his locked-in price from earlier when he first signed up. A bonus for consistency, I guess. There just isn’t that reason to not employ team orders when you do have the best team on the grid and have a preference for drivers. Maybe I’m thinking of something a bit too complex for a game that is purposefully simple, but much like overuse of the tires and fuel, I think there should be at least a reason not to use team orders.

Though speaking of the points for intra-team battles and for the championship, Golden Lap uses a much more modern points system. Golden Lap makes a point of you starting your first season in 1970, a very different year for open-wheel racing and Formula 1 in general. Realistically, first place would bag you a whole 9 points with 6 for second, and you can forget about fastest laps or similar benefits. In fact, until 1991, only the top six drivers got points, with that year upping first place to 10 points. Golden Lap uses the 2019-present offerings.

So first grabs you 25, second 18, down to 10th with a single point. With anyone in the top ten with the overall fastest lap gets another extra point; a rule only active between 1950-1959. So all throughout the 70s, if you came seventh you got sweet nothing, but if you got first you got sweet nothings from models. Being quite frank, I don’t think it matters and to those it does the simplicity and legal distinctions were already an issue. Be it tracks that are a bit different or “Luigi” M(ari)o (And)retti not exactly lightly up the track with his 77/78 performance, Golden Lap is far from whatever we call realistic now.

Golden Lap is more the type of game you open for 10 minutes while you second screen something or you are making dinner. The strategies aren’t massively impressive and in fact, you’ll have a much easier time just running a basic strategy. I believe as Martin Brundle always pipes up, Senna always noted that you had to be on the right tires at the right time. Much like Bill Shankley’s quote “Football is a simple game complicated by idiots,” being a Randy Singh for LaBrahn shouldn’t be complicated either. Focus on the tires and tire wear.

Ultimately, Golden Lap is a beautifully simple arcade management title for fans of Formula 1 in particular, and fans of open-wheel racing in general. Maybe there could be a bit more info available outside of races, the ability to leave and do something between sessions instead of just between races, and maybe some repercussions to the use of team orders for intra-team fights. It is fun, relaxing, and I desperately need to play it on a handheld though. Golden Lap is a great Sunday morning pre-race strategy game if you enjoy a much simpler F1 Manager.

A PC review copy of Golden Lap was provided by Funselektor Labs Inc. for this review.

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Golden Lap

$14.99

7.5

Score

7.5/10

Pros

• Stripped down gameplay to simply be about tactics/strategy.
• The art direction is great and inviting.
• Perfect for a pre-race brain tease.
• Sponsorship challenges could be a bit more, but are interesting.

Cons

• I'd like the ability to get up and do stuff now and then.
• Do team orders have to be this... basic?