How To Manage A Race in F1 Manager 22 – Complete Race Guide

In this guide, I’m going to run through each different part of a race in F1 Manager 22, with the goal to show you how to manage a full race. This can be a daunting game, there is certainly no question of that.

But once you break down each section of managing your drivers, you can quickly start to utilise all of the available tools at your disposal to take your favourite drivers towards the front of the grid.

I’ll start by looking at how to manage fuel, tyres and ERS throughout a race. And then I’ll touch on pit stops and race strategies.

Fuel management

I’m going to jump right into fuel management first as this is probably the easiest thing to manage during a race. With modern Formula 1 rules, you can’t refuel during a race. What you start a race with is what you have to finish with.

This means that during a race, all you have to do is ensure your fuel number, which is indicated by the red or green number in the fuel tab, stays above zero. Sounds easy right?

Well, if you don’t pay attention to this during a race you can run into a spot of bother and actually run out of fuel. Just watch our first F1 Manager 22 video, where exactly this happens to Lando Norris!

Throughout a race, you can instruct your driver to use more fuel or try to conserve fuel. These commands will affect their overall lap times as well as increasing or decreasing their fuel usage.

• Push – Increases lap time, uses the most amount of fuel per lap
• Balanced – Consistent lap times, average fuel usage per lap
• Conserve – Slower lap times, saves the most fuel per lap

If you find yourself with fuel deficiency, indicated by a red minus number, you will have to conserve fuel at some point during the race. The best times to do this are if you’re in a DRS train and finding it hard to overtake, or when you have a big gap to the car behind you.

If you conserve fuel with cars behind you, you’ll be at risk of being overtaken. So try to use the conserve fuel mode strategically when it will least impact your race.

Starting fuel loads

In the race strategy screen at the beginning of a race, you can choose how much starting fuel your driver will have. You can under-fuel or over-fuel your driver.

Underfueling will start them with less fuel than is needed to finish a race. This will result in your driver having to conserve fuel at some point during a race. The benefit of this though is that you will have a lighter car, allowing you to put in faster lap times. This is a good advantage at the start of the race, especially if you want to gain a few places immediately.

This is probably my prefered strategy, allowing my drivers to be very aggressive at the start of the race where it’s easier to make overtakes.

If you want your driver to push their pace a lot through a race, you can look to over-fuel them. This will allow them to run on the push mode for longer. This can be useful if you want to finish the race strong by pushing late in the race. Or if your driver is running a very aggressive tyre strategy.

Running out of fuel

As I said at the beginning though, you need to ensure that your driver’s fuel number stays above zero by the end of the race. If your driver has a negative fuel number coming into the last few laps, there is a high chance that they’ll run out of fuel before the end of the race.

If this happens, your driver will simply stop on the track and not finish the race.

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Tyre management

Moving on to tyre management. This is the part of your race strategy that can potentially have the biggest impact. Tyre management will dictate what race strategy you run and how many times you have to pit.

Looking at the tyre strategy screen mid-race, you’ll see that you have a few things going on. There are some downward-sloping segments in different colours. This indicates your tyres predicted life. The downward slope shows your tyre wear, starting at 100% and reducing each lap.

There is a light horizontal bar at the bottom of this screen which indicates when your tyres will be in a dangerous state of wear. This is generally around 30% tyre life remaining. You should try to not let your tyres get into this section otherwise your pace will be dramatically affected.

If you push your tyres right down to the bottom of this bar they can fail and get a puncture.

Then you’ll notice a white line that follows the coloured blocks. This is your actual tyre wear. This will roughly follow the coloured blocks but can dip below or stay above depending on how well your driver is saving tyre life.

You can directly affect how hard your driver pushes on their tyres using the pace commands. Aggressive pace modes will reduce your tyre life, but increase pace, while lighter modes will conserve tyres while reducing tyre wear.

• Attack mode – Large increase to tyre temperatures, tyre wear, fastest pace
• Aggressive mode – Moderate increase to tyre temperatures, tyre wear, fast pace
• Standard mode – No increase or decrease to tyre wear or pace
• Light mode – Reduces tyre temperatures and tyre wear, slower pace
• Conserve mode – Large reduction to tyre wear, slowest pace

If you notice the white bar is running below the coloured segment, this means you’re wearing the tyres faster than predicted. I’d suggest that you reduce your driver’s pace to help conserve some tyres.

But, if your driver is kind on their tyres and the white line is tracking higher than the coloured block. This indicates you have extra tyre life than predicted.

In these scenarios, you can either push your driver’s pace more to utilise this extra tyre life. Or you could look to continue to conserve the tyres and pit later in the race. This may open up alternative race strategies such as one-stopping instead of two-stopping.

Tyre temperatures

If you are racing behind another car, or on an aggressive pace mode, you should keep an eye on your tyre temperatures. Increased tyre temperature will increase the rate at which your tyres wear. Hotter tyres result in more tyre wear.

You’ll see from the help indicator, that tyre temperatures will change to yellow, orange and red when pushed too hard. Try to always stay out of the red temperature category. This will result in a lot of tyre degradation.

If your tyres are getting too hot, you can either reduce your pace mode or ask your driver to drive in clean air. With this enabled they will try to position their car in clean air where they can which will help to cool the tyres and your engine.

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ERS management

ERS management is without a doubt the trickiest strategy element to fully understand in F1 Manager 22. Both pace and fuel are pretty easy, increase your pace and fuel usage to put in faster lap times at the expense of fuel and tyre wear.

But ERS is slightly different.

• Overtake – Burns 2 MJ per lap
• Defend – Burns 2 MJ per lap
• Deploy – Burns 2 MJ per lap
• Neutral – No MJ per lap
• Harvest – Stores 1 MJ per lap

Looking at the ERS strategy screen, you’ll see five different ERS commands. But next to the top three, overtake, defend and deploy, it says they all use the same amount of ERS. So why are there three different ERS options then?

Simply put, these three ERS strategies do use on average the same amount of ERS each lap, but it allows your driver to deploy ERS strategically around a lap.

Overtake for example will tell your driver to burn a lot of ERS all at once to try and overtake the car in front. Defend is pretty similar, but your driver will be focusing on defending from the car behind.

With both of these ERS modes, I’d suggest you manually enable and disable them throughout a lap. For example, if you’re about to try and overtake someone, turn ERS up to overtake as your driver is a couple of corners away from the longest straight on the track.

This will tell them to close the gap and use a lot of ERS to try and make an overtake down the long straight. Once your guy is ahead or the overtake attempt failed, you should then drop the ERS mode back down to neutral.

This will avoid your driver using a lot of excess ERS in places around the lap where overtaking is very hard. And the same applies to using the defend mode against cars behind.

The deploy mode will use the same amount of ERS as overtake and defend, but your driver will use it more evenly around a lap. This will help them put in an overall faster lap time than when using overtake. This is useful for fastest lap attempts, qualifying laps and fast in-laps or out-laps.

The neutral ERS mode will keep your battery level relatively stable, using and harvesting the same amount of ERS each lap.

If you are running low on ERS, then you should enable the harvest mode. This will slow your driver down and allow them to conserve some battery. It will take roughly four laps with harvest mode enabled to fully replenish your battery from 0% to 100%.

During this time you will be vulnerable to being overtaken from behind. Much like the attacking ERS modes, you can use harvest strategically. Use it when you’re in an DRS train with little chance of making an overtake. Or if you have a big gap to the car behind.

If you have a car attacking you from behind, try not to use harvest ERS mode, otherwise, you’ll be an easy target.

For a more detailed explanation of ERS in F1 Manager 22, read our complete ERS guide.

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Pit strategies

When choosing a race strategy at the start of a race, there are a few key indicators to look out for. After all, choosing the right strategy is one of the most important decisions you’ll have each race weekend!

The first thing you’ll want to keep an eye on is the tyre life chart at the top of the screen. This indicates the predicted tyre life of each tyre, and whether you will run out of tyres, or underutilise your tyres.

The key here is to ensure whichever strategy you pick, that each tyre is being fully utilised. There is a light bar across the bottom of this screen. This indicates around 30% tyre life remaining, and it’s this bar that you want to stay away from.

You’ll want to ensure that no tyre dips into this bar during a stint. If it is predicted that a tyre will dip into this window, you have a few options. You can either change your driver’s pace on that stint, run harder compound tyres, or by add a pitstop.

The second thing to pay attention to is the estimated race time on the right of the screen. You’ll see that when you have a strategy selected, it will give you an estimated race time.

Then as you hover over different strategies, it will indicate whether that strategy will be faster or slower overall. Typically, this is the most important part of a strategy, and you’ll want the fastest race strategy possible.

But there are some exceptions. If you are starting towards the back of the grid, you may want to run a one-stop strategy, even if it isn’t the fastest overall strategy. The cars may be holding you up, so running a long first stint can open up the opportunity to be fast later on when you are out of traffic.

Or, you may prefer an aggressive two or three-stop strategy to try and overtake cars on track. It may technically be slower than some other strategies, but these external factors need to be considered.

And finally, you should always, always, always check the predicted weather. If it is likely to start raining during a race, you may want to time your pitstops with the rain. This can result in you making fewer pitstops than those around you, giving you a good advantage.

Pit windows

During the race, you will notice there is a 5 or 6 lap window that is considered your pit window. You’ll be notified by your race engineer when one of your drivers enters their pit window.

This means that you should be looking to pit your driver within the next few laps. You don’t always need to pit on the exact lap that you selected in your initial race strategy screen.

Different factors throughout a race will almost always mean you’ll be pitting a few laps earlier or later than planned. If you are racing other cars hard before your pitstop, you may have more tyre wear than anticipated, forcing an earlier pit stop.

Or if you are in a comfortable window with no cars around you, you may be able to conserve tyres and run longer into the race before you pit.

Undercutting

I would highly recommend keeping an eye on the cars around you. If they are within a couple of seconds and pit before you, they may be attempting to undercut you.

This means they are pitting onto newer, faster tyres and they will be putting in faster lap times when they exit the pits. This will allow them to close the gap to you if you don’t cover their strategy and pit as well.

You can also use this strategy to try and jump cars ahead of you in the pits. If you are being held up, you can pit a lap or two before the car in front. Then when you exit the pits on faster tyres, you should be able to put in faster lap times and jump the car ahead of you by the time they pit.

Overcutting

Overcutting is the opposite of undercutting. It is essentially staying out on track longer than cars around you to gain an advantage. This works very well if cars around you exit the pit lane into traffic. The traffic can slow them down, allowing you to continue to put in faster lap times, despite the other cars having newer tyres.

In this scenario, you could pit a few laps later than a competitor who is held up in slower traffic and potentially jump them and the traffic when you exit the pits.

You can also use this strategy if you have been very conservative on your tyres. If you have plenty of tyre life left when cars around you pit, consider staying out and increasing your pace. This will allow your driver to use the last remaining tyre life to put in some incredibly fast laps.

This could result in you overcutting drivers who are driving at a slower pace to conserve tyre life.

Using all of your tyres and fuel

Whichever pit strategy you go with, I would always recommend using your tyres to the fullest. You don’t want to be pitting to take off tyres that still have some life left in them.

You’ll see from the tyre wear screen that there is a lighter strip across the bottom of the tyre life screen. This indicates when your tyres have around 30% life left.

You should be aiming for your drivers to push their tyres down to this line by the time they pit. If their white tyre life bar is higher than this lighter segment coming up to a pit stop, I’d recommend allowing them to push their pace to fully utilise their tyres.

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Overview

Hopefully, these tips will have helped you manage races in F1 Manager 22. While racing, don’t worry if you run out of fuel, ERS or tyres during a race. Simply use that experience to ensure the next race is more positive.

For a great example of this check out my first F1 Manager 22 race where I ran out of fuel. And then watch our Spanish race, where we are competing for the win. In just a few races, I completely turned around my team’s fortune by utilising the tips above!

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