F1 Manager 23 Preview – Rewriting reality with the new Race Replay mode

thesixthaxis.com:

If there’s one thing that everybody loves to do while watching Formula 1, it’s to second guess what the teams and drivers are doing right in the thick of the action. Admittedly, this is mainly when Ferrari make yet another completely baffling strategy call and throw away any hope of a good finish, but there’s almost always some significant event or decision that has a ripple effect through the rest of the race, where one team or driver loses out while another succeeds. Enter F1 Manager 2023, Frontier’s second crack at the motorsport management sim that comes with more of this wish fulfilment than you can shake a wheel gun at.

The most direct example of this is the new Race Replay mode, which adds mid-race scenarios based on real race events and situations, and tasks you with trying to rewrite history like it’s a motorsports episode of Quantum Leap. We went hands-on with the scenario for the Monaco Grand Prix, where the burning question on everyone’s lips after the race was whether Aston Martin threw away Fernando Alonso’s chance of a victory. The team pitting first to fresh slick tyres on a worsening track, but what if they’d gone straight to Inters?

This scenario is maybe not the best example of what Race Replay can offer – it’s just so cut and dried that Alonso going straight to Inters and then banging in a fast lap while Verstappen makes a mistake on his in-lap would have given them the lead, and we all know it’s nigh on impossible for an on-track overtake between leading cars at Monaco. In my particular attempt, I could effectively make that call in the first few seconds and then set the game to sim the race at 16x speed, occasionally fiddling with minor strategy settings. Of course, it helped that Verstappen slapped