Managing fuel and tyres throughout a race in F1 Manager 22 is one of your main tasks. These decisions will help decide where you finish. So here are our top tips for mastering these gameplay elements.
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There are a large number of elements that you need to manage in F1 Manager 22. But without a doubt, your fuel and tyres are two of the most important things that you need to look after.
Good tyre and fuel management can make a huge difference in a race, allowing you to potentially finish much higher than your car’s pace should allow.
In this guide, I’m going to run through how to best manage your tyres and your fuel in F1 Manager 22.
I’m going to start by looking at fuel management as this is slightly easier than tyres. During a race in F1 Manager 22, you aren’t allowed to refuel your car. So you have to choose your fuel amount before a race.
And then during a race, you need to ensure that your driver isn’t using too much fuel. If they do use too much fuel, you will be at risk of not finishing the race. If you completely run out of fuel mid-race, your driver will stop on the track and not finish. Just watch our first F1 Manager 22 video, where this actually happened to Lando Norris!
You have a few tools that you can make use of during a race, allowing your driver to use more or less fuel.
Each of these fuel modes will allow your driver to increase or decrease their lap times to adjust their fuel usage. Push mode will result in faster lap times but come at the cost of more fuel usage each lap. This will result in your fuel number decreasing, eventually turning red and going into a negative number.
If this number remains negative by the end of the race, you’ll run out of fuel!
The balanced mode won’t make the number go up or down too much, resulting in average fuel consumption.
The conserve mode will slow your driver down every lap, but it will allow the fuel usage to decrease as well. This will result in your overall fuel number going up.
One of the main decisions you have regarding fuel consumption is your starting fuel load. This is decided in the race strategy screen at the beginning of every race.
Here you can choose how much fuel your driver will have to start the race with. You can choose to under-fuel or over-fuel your driver which will affect their pace and fuel consumption.
Underfueling your driver will result in them starting with less fuel than is required to finish a race. Your driver will have a slightly lighter car at the start of the race, making them a bit quicker than if they had a higher fuel load.
However, under-fueling also means that your driver will have to conserve fuel at some point during the race. If they don’t conserve fuel during the race, they run the risk of running out of fuel before the race ends.
The alternative to under-fueling is to over-fuel your driver at the start of the race. This will result in a heavier car at the start of the race which leads to slightly slower lap times. But it will allow your driver the flexibility to push harder during the race.
This can lead to your driver being faster towards the end of the race and finishing strong.
I did touch on this, but if your driver does run out of fuel before the end of the race, they will stop on track. This will result in a DNF and your driver won’t score any points during the race.
You can avoid this by ensuring their fuel number stays positive, or above 0 as you reach the finish line on your last lap.
An area in F1 Manager 22 where you will need to take a more active role in managing fuel is during qualifying and practice sessions.
During these sessions, you can dictate how much fuel each of your drivers has for each stint you run. During practice, it is always recommended to run long stints of 20+ laps. This will maximise your track acclimatisation as well as your car setup feedback.
During qualifying, you have the option to choose between a single qualifying lap or running multiple laps. It is standard to do one flying lap, come back to the pits and then do a second flying lap.
However, there are some situations where you may want to change this approach. At some tracks, it may be beneficial to do multiple flying laps. If this is the case, I would recommend including a cooldown lap by ticking the cooldown lap box.
This will automatically fuel your car with the correct fuel amount. You can however add additional fuel during qualifying. This can be beneficial, especially during wet conditions.
Additional fuel during qualifying will give you the option of staying on track longer, which is ideal during wet conditions when it is unclear when the best track conditions will be.
It isn’t uncommon during a full wet qualifying session for drivers to stay out on track for the whole session. You can increase your additional fuel in these scenarios to give you the flexibility to do this if required.
Tyre management in F1 Manager 22 is much more involved compared to fuel management. You have a lot more control over your tyre strategies and how your drivers push their tyres. These decisions will ultimately affect your overall race strategy and how many times you pit during a race.
Learning how to read the tyre management screen in F1 Manager 22 is one of the first things you should look to do. It’s a screen you’ll be using a lot during a race weekend and the Grand Prix.
You will see below that there are a few bars that are all trending downwards. The coloured blocks indicate the predicted life of your tyres. This shows the tyre’s wear over time.
The vertical blue bars indicate scheduled pit stops. And you will notice that this extends to a few laps on either side. This is your pit window where a pit stop is expected.
Then there is the white line which is roughly following the coloured blocks. This indicates your actual tyre wear. If the white bar is above the coloured block it means your tyre wear is better than expected and your tyres are wearing slower. This is a good thing.
If the white line is below the coloured blocks it means your tyres are wearing out faster than expected.
Finally, there is a light horizontal bar at the bottom of this screen. This shows you the danger zone for your tyres and indicates around 30% of tyre life remaining. You should always try to stay out of this zone and pit before your tyre wear line reaches it. When under 30% tyre life, your speed will reduce fairly dramatically and you run the risk of tyre failures.
You have a range of pace modes available to each driver which will directly affect your tyre wear. Faster pace modes will increase your pace while also increasing tyre wear.
Slower pace modes will result in slower lap times but increased tyre life. This will allow your tyres to last longer into the race.
You should look to switch between these various pace modes throughout a race depending on your situation. If you’re pushing for an overtake, aggressive or attack mode will help you achieve this.
But if you’re stuck behind a queue of cars and can’t overtake, reducing your pace mode will allow you to conserve tyres.
You can view your tyre temperatures during a race at any point. These directly affect your tyre wear. Hotter tyres will wear faster than cooler tyres.
Generally, as you increase your pace mode, your tyre temperatures will also increase. You will be able to see the tyre indicator changing from yellow to orange, and finally to red.
It isn’t recommended to push your tyre temperatures up to the red zone, otherwise, you’ll start losing a lot of tyre life.
If you see your tyres getting too hot at any point during a race, you can either reduce your pace or ask your driver to drive in clean air. Both of these things will potentially slow your driver down, but they’ll also bring your tyre temperatures down which will help with tyre wear.
During a race weekend, you will have a limited number of tyres allocated to each driver. These are the only tyres you have to use throughout a full weekend, so you’ll need to plan your tyre usage during the practice and qualifying sessions.
Every race weekend, both of your drivers will be able to use up to 13 sets of dry tyres, and 7 sets of wet weather tyres. These are divided by compound giving you a range of different performing tyres to use throughout a race weekend.
In total, each driver will have access to;
These aren’t all available from the start of practice 1. There are a few tyres which are locked initially. These are 1 set of soft tyres which are locked for Q3 if your driver makes it there.
Then there is 1 set of medium and 1 set of hard tyres which are locked until the race. This ensures that you will always have a new set of medium and hard tyres for the race.
Also, you have to be aware that after each practice session, you will have to hand back 2 sets of tyres. These will be the most worn tyres from that practice session.
For this reason, it is advisable that you don’t use more than 2 sets of tyres during each practice session. Also, try to keep either 3 or 4 sets of soft tyres for qualifying if you can.
My normal tyre usage throughout a weekend looks like the following;
This approach will ensure you have enough tyres for a couple of runs during Q2 and Q3 on new soft tyres. And it will ensure you get the maximum out of your tyres during practice sessions.
With this approach, you will have the choice of a brand new set of medium and hard tyres during the race, along with your slightly worn soft tyres from qualifying.
Read our F1 Manager 22 tyre management guide for a more detailed explanation along with extra tips and tricks.
Hopefully, this tyre and fuel management guide for F1 Manager 22 will help you with your race strategy for each Grand Prix. Using these tips will generally help you maximise your tyre usage and utilise your fuel to its fullest.
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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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