F1 Manager from EA Sports turned the wheel recently 25 times! Yes, our all-time favourite F1 manager game, and for decades the only one on the market is that old. However, over here, we had F1 Manager 2001 and F1 Manager and if you look deeply in the game data it says F1 Manager 1999. Anyways, time for a little recap, time for a trip back to memory-lane. Time to explore our love for this hidden-gem. I mean who didn’t became World champion with Minardi or Arrows in 2000!
F1 Manager is bugged since it’s release 25 years ago. Though I do believe, it is hard to program and create a proper manager game without flaws and strange moves from the computer opponents. Yet if you started the game for the first time and you wanted Michael Schumacher and David Coulthard in your team simply offer them a joke salary. They would eventually becom unavailable for the other teams to offer a contract. Therefore, you would hire two drivers that were cheap for 2000 and offered Schumi and David a 1-euro contract.
However, it is not where I want to go to with this article. F1 Manager, in my opinion, became a cult-classic. There was also Microprose’s Grand Prix World from 1999, based on the 1998 season. However, i wasn’t able to have the game installed not even years later and not even last week. Perhaps it is just me. F1 Manager from EA just works fine it doesn’t matter how old your system is. I got it working on Windows 95 and Windows 11 even!
Another positivity about the game was the “modding” community behind it. Yes, like all the other EA Sports F1 games from those days had. I recall Alex Hall (Website still works!) and Mangoletsi making some mods adding new engines and drivers to the game. Which gave it some extras. It was also possible to add new engines yourself to the game (if you knew what you were doing). Once the game was started, it was quite easy to understand the handling. Even 10 year old me who didn’t fluently speak English understood everything.
The menu was easy in use, and if you couldn’t win you could just cheat your way through the season by using those strange manager names when you started a new season. Such as Win~at~all~COSTS! Or Billy No Race. Perhaps says enough i still remember these names.
Maybe it is my own perception or my generation that grew up with these games. Just switching on the family PC, if you didn’t ruin it already with downloading crap via KaZaa or Napster, and play all Saturday night F1 Manager. Going as far to Season 6 with Minardi or Arrows only to fail badly and get fired at the end of the season like Horner at Red Bull earlier this year.
I got fond memories and feeling with F1 Manager, every now and then I still play it. Somehow, I still get excited watching the race “live” and see my drivers run out of fuel or randomly end up in the grid. Because that’s what this game was all about just that one race you would randomly win with your Minardi M01 or Arrows A20!
