F1 Manager 22 – Should You Research, Design or Manufacture First?

To succeed in F1 Manager 22, you’ll need to master your car development. This is especially true if you’re starting with a team such as Williams or Haas. Design, research and manufacturing are all very important to help you turn up on track with a fast car.

But it can be difficult to decide on what to develop first. And should you focus on designing new parts for this year’s car, or focus on researching for next year’s car?

In this guide, I’ll run through my top tips for developing your car, including where to focus your development time, and how to optimise each car part.

Designing new car parts

Designing new car parts is fundamental to developing your car. Whether you are researching for the following year or designing new parts for this year, the process is very similar.

You first have to identify which part you’d like to develop. And this can be figured out using a few methods. You can check the calendar and see which races are coming up and which car parts are beneficial for those upcoming races. Or you can compare your car to competitors’ cars to see how you stack up and where you lack performance.

Focusing on upcoming races

First I’ll take a look at how to check upcoming races.

You will notice as you scroll through the calendar and the circuit information for each track, that there is a selection of blue and green thumb icons for suggested car performance. This is essentially telling us which parts of our car’s performance are most important for each track.

If a track has a blue thumb icon, it means that part is important, and if it has a green thumb icon, it means it’s very important.

What this essentially means is, that if your car is strong in the suggested areas, you’ll perform better at that track.

For example, the British Grand Prix emphasises the need for a car that has a good top speed and high-speed cornering. If your car meets these criteria, you’re in for a better race than cars that don’t perform well in these areas.

You can access the circuit information for each track at any point in the calendar, so you can see what upcoming races focus on which part of your car. This allows you to plan upgrades throughout the season.

Upgrades generally take between 2 and 4 weeks to design, and another few days to manufacture. This gives you around a 30-40 day window for developing any parts, unless of course, you’re spending a lot of money to rush development!

I would suggest that you periodically take a look at races that are upcoming, looking ahead by around 2 to 3 races. See which car parts are important for these races and then design some new car parts to match the criteria.

You may want to check a few races and not focus on just one, as some tracks such as Monaco are anomalies. You don’t want to go fixating on Monaco and develop a car that is extremely good in low-speed corners. As on either side of Monaco, you have Spain and Baku followed by Canada and Silverstone, a few tracks that focus much more on high-speed cornering.

Comparing against competitors

The other method to help you decide where to focus your development is to compare your car’s performance against other cars. You can compare cars side by side to see where other cars are better than you and vice versa.

Head over to the cars segment, and then car analysis. Here you can choose any two cars to compare. I often look at those teams that are just above me. For example in my McLaren playthrough, I initially looked at Alpine and AlphaTauri to see where they were outperforming my cars. Then I looked ahead to Mercedes as I developed the car further.

When comparing two cars, you can see on the right-hand side which car is better by seeing which car is highlighted in white.

Using a combination of this method along with keeping an eye on upcoming tracks is a surefire way to start to outperform cars around you.

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How to design new car parts efficiently

When you have decided which car parts to design first, the next stage is allocating research time along with fine-tuning your design towards the areas that you wish to focus on.

CFD and wind tunnel hours

The first decision you’ll have to make is to choose how much testing time you wish to assign to the design. The more time you assign, the better the part will be. However, you are limited to a set number of testing hours each period. And a testing period normally lasts 56 days, so just under two months.

That means that every period, your testing hours will be reset, allowing you to design and research new parts again.

I would normally stray away from spending all of my testing time on a single part. While this will improve that single part, it will slow down the development of the rest of the car. Instead, I’d recommend designing two or even three parts every testing period.

So when it comes to allocating testing time, I simply divide the total hour allocation by either two or three to come up with the number I’ll assign to each part.

Design focus

Next up, you can tailor your design using the design focus. This part of designing a new part gives you extra control over exactly the areas that you focus your development on.

Deciding where to allocate the focus comes back to the previous step, and the research when looking at upcoming tracks and competitor’s cars. In that step, you should have noted down which parts of your car need development.

For this example, I’m going to focus more on medium-speed cornering and airflow sensitivity. This will reduce the effectiveness of brake cooling, but improve our dirty air cornering and our overall cornering.

Approach

Once you have tinkered with the design focus, you can assign your engineers. You have a limited number of engineers who you can assign to the project. More engineers will reduce the time it takes to design the new part. Much like our testing hours, I normally divide our total allocation of engineers by the number of parts I’m developing in the current period.

Finally, you can choose your approach. A normal approach is the standard option, while rushing will speed up the design time at the expense of increased cost.

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Research or design

When it comes to choosing whether to research parts for next year’s car vs designing parts for this year’s car, you have to consider a few elements. Where are you currently in the championship? Are you in a tight battle with other teams? Are you languishing at the rear of the grid? Are you running away with the title?

All of these questions can help you decide whether to focus on gaining expertise for the following season or developing this year’s car.

If you are at the bottom of the grid consistently or running away with the constructor’s championship, I’d recommend primarily researching. If you’re doing neither of these things, you should split your focus between design and research.

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How research works in F1 22

Research looks very similar to designing new parts, however, it is actually pretty different. Researching areas of the car for the following season will grant you research benefits. This is a bonus that is added to your car parts expertise for specific areas of the car.

This is especially handy to help you combat new technical regulations. These new technical rules come into play during the season, and allow you to vote on a specific direction for the technical regulations for the following season. Once you’ve voted, the technical rules will only come into force the following season.

Generally, these will negatively affect your car, such as reducing specific areas of your car parts expertise. What these technical rules won’t do is actually affect your car’s performance. They’ll only affect your expertise in certain areas, making it harder to design good parts the following season.

In this example here, you can see that the upcoming technical regulation change is going to negatively affect our engine cooling by around 30%. Now, this won’t reduce our car’s engine cooling by 30% when we start the new season. It affects our car parts expertise in these areas.

If I go to the research screen, you’ll see this penalty being applied if I hover over the engine cooling attribute. Come to the start of next season, our car parts expertise would reduce by 30%.

So this is where researching can really help. You can then go ahead and research specific car parts that help boost your parts expertise. In this case, if I were to research this new part, I would boost my expertise next year by a good chunk. I can research this multiple times throughout the current season to claw back some of the expertise loss that I’d be facing next year.

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Overview

Hopefully, this research and development guide for F1 Manager 22 helps you decide on when to research and when to develop the current year’s car. I’ve touched on how to design new car parts efficiently and how to choose which parts to design.

If you have any questions, drop them in the comments below. And if you fancy reading some more guides for F1 Manager 22, check out all of the guides we’ve written about F1 Manager 22 so far.

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