New cars and Miami’s new track give F1 22 plenty to handle

polygon.com:

Even if it added no new tracks, no new modes of play, F122 was always going to be a bear for the developers at Codemasters. New regulations governing the cars’ engines, fuel mixtures, and aerodynamics packages have completely remade the real-life pecking order of Mercedes, Ferrari, Red Bull, and the others after four real-life races. Before you even mention new modes, liveries, or customizations, Lee Mather’s job is to give Formula One fans a lifelike game that plays according to viewer and commentator expectations — and those are still evolving, right up to the game’s launch.

“We have less time to understand the performance order of the cars; we have less time to understand the nuances of each of the teams,” Mather, the game’s creative director, said in an interview with Polygon. “It’s something we’ve always really focused on — which [cars] were good under braking, which had good traction, which cars were particularly good in the wet, and which engines were strong at a certain type of track. We understood all of those things. Now it’s all new, and it’s all learning.”

They’re not flying completely in the dark, Mather noted. Codemasters still gets data from all 10 racing teams with each session they run, and the developers will infuse their game’s handling model with it through the Canadian Grand Prix, the last race before F1 22’s July 1 launch (June 28 for those who pre-order its Champions Edition). In a preview build made available over the past week, I felt out a car that, with the difficulty settings that I used in F1 2021, drove consistently and predictably on standard racing setups — but the game made it clear that finding the sweet spot on the rear wing will be the key to unlocking lap times in the leaderboards’