How To Manage A Full Race in F1 Manager 2023: Ultimate Race Guide

With so much happening during a race, knowing what to look out for, and how to manage a race in F1 Manager 23 is key.

In this guide, I’m going to run through each part of an entire race in F1 Manager 23. I’ll show you the most important areas to keep an eye on, along with tips on how to manage your fuel, tyres and ERS in F1 Manager 23.

Watch our full F1 Manager 23 race guide video

Below is a complete video running through all of the tips in this guide.

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Tyre management in F1 Manager 23

The first thing I want to look at in our race management guide for F1 Manager 23 are the tyres. These are possibly the most crucial area of management that can affect the race outcome.

Good tyre management can really boost your driver’s performance throughout a race. And can help you easily overtake some cars through good pit stop management and strategy.

I won’t touch on the initial pre-race strategy too much. Instead, I want to focus on managing your tyres and tyre wear during a race. And all of this can be done from the pace commands mid-race.

How pace commands affect tyre wear

Your pace commands dictate how aggressive or conservative you ask your driver to be on track. More aggressive commands will lead to potentially faster lap times, but much more tyre wear. Conservative strategies will help to preserve tyre life, making them last longer.

Below are all of the pace commands you can give your driver during a race in F1 Manager 23;

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

Understanding the tyre management graph

While looking at your tyre wear during a race, you will see a graph which is made up of different colours. These solid blocks of colour indicate the expected tyre wear during each stint.

There will also be a white line which tracks in a similar direction to the block of colour. This is your actual tyre wear.

If the white line is trending above the coloured block, it means your driver is wearing their tyres slower than anticipated. This will mean tyres will last longer, allowing you to either pit later, or increase the pace commands and push harder.

If the white line is trending below the coloured block, it means that your tyres are wearing faster than they should. This will negatively affect your strategy as you may need to pit sooner for fresher tyres.

There is also a horizontal bar that runs the length of this graph. This indicates the danger territory of tyre wear. If your tyres enter this area, they will risk puncturing or your driver losing control due to low grip. Try to avoid going into this danger zone if possible.

How to manage tyre wear using commands

You can have a big impact on how the tyres wear using the pace commands mentioned above. However, you can also use this graph to make critical decisions on the pace your drivers should run at.

• Tyres are wearing slower – You can increase the driver’s pace to improve lap times or pit later.
• Tyres are wearing faster – You can reduce the driver’s pace which will slow them down or pit sooner.

Tyre temperatures affect on tyre wear

As well as using pace commands to dictate your driver’s tyre wear, there is another factor to how fast tyres wear in F1 Manager 23. And that is the tyre temperature.

You can view the tyre temperatures during a race using the car info panel. Just like in F1 23 or in real-world racing, various actions can impact tyre temperatures. And in turn, your tyre temperatures will affect the wear rate of the tyres.

Increases tyre temperature	Decreases tyre temperature
Driving more aggressively	Driving more conservatively
Driving close to another car	Driving in clean air
Using wet tyres on a dry track

The outcome of tyre temperature changes will impact the wear rate of your tyres. For example, if the tyres are getting too hot, they will generally wear faster, and your driver will start to lose grip.

If the tyres are too cold or not up to temperature, your driver will also lose grip causing them to slide around on track. This sliding can wear your tyres.

Ideally, you’ll be wanting to aim for optimal tyre temperatures as much as possible during a race. Optimal temperatures will give your driver the highest levels of grip and keep the wear rate stable.

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Fuel management during a race

Next up, I’ll look at fuel management during a race in F1 Manager 23. This isn’t as tricky to manage as tyres but can be just as critical. Especially if you run out of fuel towards the end of a race. This can even cause a DNF!

Choosing how much fuel to start a race with

The first decision you have with fuel management is how much starting fuel your driver will have. You can choose to under fuel them, which means putting in less fuel than is required to finish a race.

This will force your driver to have to conserve fuel during a race to make it to the end. Generally, this is how most real-world Formula 1 teams operate.

You can also over fuel your driver if you want to drive more aggressively throughout a race. This strategy can be good if you are planning to stop 2 or 3 times and utilise the speed of the soft tyres.

Managing fuel during a race

You can manage the fuel levels of each driver during a race in F1 Manager 23 by issuing commands in the fuel tab. These act in a similar way to pace commands that I mentioned earlier, but primarily affect fuel usage.

Below are the different commands you can give your driver.

• Push – Decreases 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

You can keep an eye on your current fuel load by looking at the red or green number in the fuel tab. If its green, it means you have excess fuel and if its red, it means you don’t have enough fuel to finish the race.

Your goal is to ensure the fuel number stays positive and green. It’s not a problem if it goes red during a race, especially if you’re pushing to overtake or put in some fast laps.

However, it will mean you’ll need to conserve fuel at a later stage of the race.

When to push harder	When to conserve fuel
Trying to overtake a car	If stuck behind another car
In-lap or out-lap before or after a pit stop	In a DRS train
Trying for fastest lap	During a safety car

What happens if you run out of fuel in F1 Manager 23?

If you do run out of fuel during a race, your driver will stop on track as refuelling isn’t allowed. Your driver will then not finish the race and end with a DNF.

This is pretty much the worse outcome to a race weekend, and running out of fuel is a silly mistake to make. That said, I have done this numerous times during playing F1 Manager 22 and 23, and it is the most frustrating thing!

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Managing ERS throughout a race

Now we’ve spoken about tyres and fuel management, which is a generally easy concept. You push harder and you use more fuel and tyres. However, next, I’m going to talk about managing ERS in F1 Manager 23. And this is a bit trickier although it has been improved over last year’s game which was even more confusing.

Managing your ERS isn’t as simple as turning it up to use more and turning it down to use less. Well, that principle still applies, but there is some more math involved.

You can set different ERS modes throughout a race, with each one using ERS in a different way.

Below are the different modes.

• Deploy – Burns 2 MJ per lap
• Neutral – No MJ per lap
• Top-Up – Stores a small amount of MJ per lap
• Harvest – Stores 1 MJ per lap

In last year’s game the deploy mode was split into three modes, overtake, defend and deploy. Those are gone in F1 Manager 23. Instead, there is a single deploy mode, but there is the addition of an ERS Battle Assist option.

How ERS Battle Assist works in F1 Manager 23

With the removal of the overtake and defend ERS modes, F1 Manager 23 introduces ERS Battle Assist. In this year’s game you can select your driver to use deploy ERS mode. This will let them burn around 2MJ of ERS per lap.

However, with this mode selected, they will use ERS throughout the lap to try to put in the best lap time possible. If you want your driver to use their ERS to overtake or defend, you also need to enable the ERS Battle Assist.

This option will tell your driver to use the ERS more strategically to overtake or defend against other drivers. So when you are trying to overtake a car, ensure you have enough battery stored, and then enable both the deploy ERS mode and the ERS Battle Assist to maximise your chances of an overtake.

This approach cleans up the rather confusing ERS deployment modes from last year which had three individual deployment modes for deploy, overtake and defend.

If you have some clean air or are going for a hot lap, you can simply enable the deploy mode and leave ERS Battle Assist disabled. This will result in the overall fastest lap times. It’s great for fastest lap attempts, or if you’re putting in a fast in-lap or out-lap to try and overtake during a pit stop sequence.

Then you have the neutral deployment mode. This will try to keep the battery state stable. Your driver will still use some ERS, but they’ll also allow it to recover throughout the lap. This is the mode you’ll be using most often during a race.

The harvest mode will limit your driver from using ERS, instead, they’ll try to actively charge the battery. This is good to use if you’re stuck behind a car and want to charge your ERS for an overtake attempt.

Deploying vs harvesting ERS battery

Where things get a little more confusing with ERS management in F1 Manager 23 is the speed at which the battery is depleted and refilled. This is indicated by the number to the right of each deployment mode.

The deploy mode drains the battery by -2MJ per lap. Neutral keeps things relatively stable, and harvest recovers 1MJ per lap. The new Top-Up mode recovers a tiny bit of ERS without slowing your driver down as much as if they were harvesting.

So as a general rule of thumb, it’ll take around a lap to two laps to fully drain your battery using the deploy mode depending on the track you are at.

But you will recover ERS much slower. It will take around 4 whole laps to fully recover a depleted battery using the harvest mode. During this time, you’ll be vulnerable to being overtaken.

Try to plan your harvesting laps for a time when you aren’t being closely followed by other cars. Or if you do have cars around you, use the top-up mode periodically to try and recover a small bit of battery.

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When to time your pit stops

It’s right at the beginning of a race where you’ll set your race strategy and choose your pit stop timing. However, there is a lot that can happen during a race in F1 Manager 23 that can change the lap you pit on.

You may want to change your pit stop timing if;

• A safety car comes out
• It starts to rain
• You are stuck in traffic
• Your tyre wear is better or worse than anticipated
• To overcut or undercut another driver

Each of these events are solid reasons for adjusting your pit stop timing. But let’s remove all of those variables from the equation for a moment. The real dictator for when you will pit is your tyre life.

As mentioned earlier, you should be actively managing your tyre wear throughout a race. The ideal time to pit is just before the tyre goes into the white bar that runs across the bottom of the tyre wear graph. This is around 30% of the remaining tyre life.

Pit windows

You will be notified by the race engineer during a race when you are approaching your pit window, so you don’t need to remember the exact lap to pit.

The pit window is a small window of a few laps indicating your planned pit stop time. Depending on the tyre life remaining, you can force a pit stop earlier or later than planned. You can even completely miss your planned pit window if you are doing well on tyre wear.

Pitting under a safety car

As I mentioned, pitting when a safety car comes out is a great strategy call if it works for your race strategy. A regular pit stop will cost you just over 20 seconds on average.

But when a safety car is on track or there is a virtual safety car, that time is reduced dramatically. This is because all other cars are lapping slower due to the safety car. This means you’ll lose much less time during a pit stop.

However, this strategy only really works if the safety car is close to your pit window. If you have only been on your tyres for 2 or 3 laps and a safety car comes out, it probably isn’t worth pitting again.

But if a safety car comes out a few laps before you were scheduled to pit, then it’s definitely worth considering pitting.

Undercutting and overcutting during a pit stop

When battling a car on track, a pit stop window is a great tool to use to try and force an overtake. You can try to either undercut or overcut the car in front.

These are terms for pitting earlier or later than the cars around you to gain an advantage.

In principle, an undercut will allow you to pit earlier than the car in front. This will put you on fresher and potentially faster tyres at least a lap before the car you’re racing.

During that lap, you could put in a faster lap on the fresher tyres to try and leap frog the car in front. This also works really well if you are being held up by a slow car.

An overcut is the opposite. This strategy keeps you out longer than a car that pits before you. This will work well if pitting would put your car out in slower traffic. You can use the clean track to your advantage to put in a faster lap time to jump the car that has already pitted.

Overcutting also gives you a tyre advantage. The tyres that you switch to will be fresher than a car that has pitted before you as the other car will have already completed at least one lap on those tyres.

If you can stay out a few laps longer than other cars, you may be able to attack them easier using your fresher tyres.

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Conclusion

Hopefully, these tips for managing a race in F1 Manager 23 will help you run successful races. If you are unsure about anything during a race, you should use one of our top beginner tips for F1 Manager 23. And that is to pause the action and take your time.

This will let you think about each decision rather than making rushed strategy calls. You can also run practice races using the new race replay feature in F1 Manager 23. This lets you compete in individual race events outside of career mode and are a great place to test your strategy.

I’d recommend checking out our top tips for F1 Manager 23, where I talk about the most important areas of this year’s F1 Manager game in more detail and provide a few handy tips.

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