Our guide to car development in F1 Manager 2024 will run you through how designing new car parts works, and I'll share my top tips for more efficient development.
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One of the keys to succeeding in F1 Manager 2024 is to develop your car, making it more competitive throughout the season. This is true no matter whether you start your career with one of the ten current teams or create your own team.
Every team will look to bring upgrades throughout the year, so in order to keep up and progress, you must do the same. But where should you start with car development, and what upgrades should you develop first?
In this guide, I’m going to look at the best route to upgrade your car throughout each season in F1 Manager 2024.
Car development in F1 Manager 2024 is a multi-stage process. The systems are much more realistic than those in other games, including F1 24. You have to first design the new parts you wish to create and then manufacture them before you can start using them during a race weekend.
The design screen has many options. In the middle, you will see the remaining development hours. These hours are reset at the start of every new ATR period, which is a predefined amount of time. This limits how much development each car can undergo during the season.
I would always advise using all of your development hours before the end of the ATR period; otherwise, you will lose them. They don’t roll over to the next period.
Once you have designed a new car part, you’ll need to manufacture it before you can start using it. This takes an additional amount of time but is completely separate from your development hours.
You’ll have to decide how many parts you wish to make, and this decision will affect the manufacturing time. If you wish to use the new part on both cars, you must manufacture at least two parts.
Remember though, that if the car gets damaged during a race weekend, you will need spares. For example, if one driver breaks a front wing, you’ll need a spare to replace it. So if you want the new part on both cars, and one spare for each driver, that is now four parts you need to manufacture.
Factoring the design and manufacturing process, the time needed to get a part from the start of the process to being installed on your car will often be around 30-50 days. I usually use the rule of thumb of designing new car parts around 40 days before I need them. This gives around 25-30 days for the design process and 10-15 days to manufacture them.
You can rush new parts, but it often isn’t a wise financial decision, as it can cost significantly more.
The first thing I always do before developing any new car parts is analysis. This stage is vital to understanding your car’s performance and how it stacks up against other teams.
The car tab quickly shows where your car stands in terms of performance in various areas. The bars on the right of the screen indicate which parts of your car are competitive and which aren’t.
If you delve further into the car analysis screen, you can compare the car in more detail. You can also see how your car compares to other teams, and you can see a more detailed breakdown of each part. This is useful if you are looking to compete against a specific rival, or benchmark your performance against a competitor.
Once you are done comparing against other teams, you can utilise the calendar to see how well your car is expected to perform at upcoming races.
When you look at each upcoming race, you can see the parts of your car that are most important for that specific track. For example, Monza relies heavily on high-speed cornering, meaning that if your car excels in this area, you’re more likely to have a faster car at this track.
This is useful when deciding which parts to design. You can look for batches of tracks with similar characteristics and develop an upgrade that will benefit those tracks. Remember that the lead time for designing and manufacturing parts is around 40 days on average. This will dictate how late you can start developing new parts if you want that part for a certain race.
Once you have decided on the part you will develop, go to the design screen, where we can start the process.
This screen quickly shows how each car part affects performance. Your front wing and underfloor both have big impacts on your car’s entire performance, including low, medium, and high-speed cornering.
More specific parts, such as the suspension and rear wing will be less impactful so I would advise against developing those areas first. Try to remember back to your analysis and which areas your car needs work and the upcoming races you’re aiming for.
Clicking into any specific car part will bring you to the much more complex design screen. The first part of designing is assigning the amount of CFD and wind tunnel hours you wish to use.
I touched on this earlier, but you do only get a certain number of CFD (computational fluid dynamics) and wind tunnel development hours to use. You can use all of your time on a single part for one really big upgrade, or split it between multiple different parts.
I much prefer to develop one or two parts during each ATR period. This makes it easy to assign development hours, as you can split them exactly in half for two new parts. The fewer hours you use, the less impactful your new part will be.
The second part of the design process will allow you to fine tune how you wish to design each part and areas to focus on. You’ll also see the exact effect that will be had on your performance, along with the weight changes and expected lifespan for the part.
Adjusting the sliders on this screen allows you to focus your development on specific areas. If you need more cooling, you can focus on that to improve durability throughout a season at the expense of less performance gain.
When adjusting these sliders, I recommend choosing the weak areas of your car, as each car will be different.
You also have the decision of adjusting the lifespan. Increasing this will again reduce the performance gain but can make parts last longer. I would recommend lowering this for every new part.
Lower lifespan will increase performance gain, which is the main reason we develop parts. By the time your new part comes to the end of its life, you will more than likely have redesigned it.
Design expertise is a feature that tracks the expertise of your engineers. The higher this number is, the better performance gain you’ll have with each new part designed. Your team will have different levels of expertise for different car parts, and its increased by designing new parts.
The more time your engineers spend designing specific parts, and the more parts they design, the higher their expertise will be for those specific car parts.
If you plan on playing through multiple seasons, it can be beneficial to try to increase your expertise early. This can be done by assigning more development hours to a project and spending more money to improve its approach. Opting for the intense option will increase the cost, but it will improve your engineer’s expertise much more.
In the shorter term, this approach can elongate your development and cost more money. However, with higher expertise in your second and third seasons, you will be able to get better performance boosts from each new design project.
With your new car parts analysed and designed, the final step is to manufacture them. This is the least complex part of the process, and the decision on how many parts to manufacture and how fast to complete each part is generally a cost decision.
You can rush the process, but doing so will increase the cost. There is a cost cap in F1 Manager 2024 for each season which limits how much you can spend throughout each year.
Staying under this cost cap is vital, meaning any increase in spending can be a big problem further down the line. I wouldn’t recommend rushing too many new parts as the extra cost doesn’t really outweigh the benefit of gaining the new part one or two races sooner.
One really good tip for manufacturing is to actually delay it. Instead, design a couple of new iterations of the same part, and then manufacture it. This can save a lot of money, and reduce the amount of new parts you’re creating and essentially wasting.
Manufacturing new parts can be expensive with parts costing up to $500,000. Manufacturing one of these parts for each car will set you back $1 million each time you do it. Therefore, if you complete two versions of the front wing in the design phase and then manufacture it, you can save that cost to be spent elsewhere.
This rounds out our guide to car development in F1 Manager 2024. This is a really important part of the game to master as it can drastically improve your performance throughout a season when approached correctly.
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Rich is the founder, F1 car setup creator and content writer for SimRacingSetups. With over a decade of experience as a graphic designer, marketing director, competitive sim racer and avid motorsport fan, Rich founded SimRacingSetup.com to share his passion and knowledge of sim racing and Formula 1 with other sim racers. Regularly writes for sim racing website SimRaceReviews.com
View all articles written by Rich
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