An introduction to the support staff who are vital to success in F1® Manager 23.
While the drivers may be the face of a team, they won’t go anywhere fast without the right staff backing them up. A host of engineers, pit crew, and scouts make the team successful. Between them, they design and build the car, keep it running smoothly on race day, and make sure that the most talented drivers a team can afford are always at the wheel.
In this F1® Manager 23 staff guide, you will learn what each role brings to the team and how you can develop them. While car setups and drivers should be your focus on race day, it's your staff who will keep your team competitive across the seasons.
Vehicle development
The car that finishes a season significantly differs from the one that starts it. A team of engineers is constantly looking for ways to improve the car’s design, eke out another kilometre per hour, generate a little more downforce to help on the corners, and better the chassis’ airflow to cool the engine. These slight upgrades can make the difference between a championship winner and missing out on the podium entirely.
Two roles on your staff impact the development of new car parts: the Technical Chief and Head of Aerodynamics. The former oversees all aspects of car development, while the latter focuses wholly on the car's components that dictate airflow.
The higher their skills, the larger the performance increase they add to a new part. You can see your staff’s impact in the Expertise and Facilities bonus applied to the new part’s attributes. On the Staff window, you can see a clear breakdown of each chief’s abilities.
While you don’t work directly with the engineers your staff manage, you can hire a larger team by upgrading the Design Centre facility, which speeds up their work. When creating a new component, you choose how many of your engineers will work on the project and set the pace of their work – Normal, Rushed, or Intense. Normal is the default, whereas you can have the work completed more quickly if you set it to Rushed (though you will have to pay a premium), and if you choose Intense, then the job will cost even more, but the team will learn more about developing the part in the process, adding a bonus to future development.
Trackside support
Come race day, the heads of the development department take a backseat to see how all their hard work will perform on the circuit. Here, the quality of your Race Engineers, Sporting Director, and Pit Crew pays off.
The Race Engineer is your driver’s primary contact on the track and plays a vital role in each stage of a race weekend. During Practice, they collate feedback on the car’s balance, and you use this information to adjust the setup, increasing your driver’s confidence in the car’s performance. The better a communicator your Race Engineer is, the faster they collect feedback, letting you make those tweaks more quickly, in turn creating more time for your driver to stay on track building their Track Acclimatisation and Car Parts Knowledge. Those two stats and Setup Satisfaction make up a significant portion of your driver’s confidence, dictating their performance in Qualifying and the race itself.
For a more detailed look at this process, read the F1® Manager 23 Setups guide.
If the driver and Race Engineer have a good relationship and the support staff has a good Composure rating, they will reduce the confidence loss that comes with mistakes on the track. A Race Engineer who can keep their head under pressure can keep a driver focused after locking up on a turn, keeping them ready to overtake when the opportunity arises.
For more information about the impact of confidence on a race, read the F1® Manager 23 Drivers guide.
The final duty of the Race Engineer is to relay strategy to the driver during a race. While you set the strategy for each driver, your Race Engineer will tell them when they’re approaching a planned pit stop and say when it’s the optimum lap to conduct a tyre change.
The pit stop is when your Sporting Director and Pit Crew step up. The Pit Crew swap out tyres and broken components during Practice, Qualifying, and the race. The better they are at their job, the shorter the pit stop and the less likely they make a time-sapping mistake. You have to pit in most Grand Prix races, so if you can do it slightly faster than your opponents, you will gain precious seconds. It’s through your Sporting Director that you direct the training schedule of the Pit Crew, maximising their ability but also making sure they don’t become fatigued and liable to make a mistake during a Grand Prix.
Never stop growing
Like your drivers, your staff can learn new tricks. Every week of the season, they learn more about their jobs and develop their skills. Left to their own devices, staff members will improve their attributes equally, but you can also tell them to focus on specific skill sets. For instance, telling your Technical Chief to focus on Structure will see them get better at designing new Chassis, Underfloor, and Suspension at the expense of improving their knowledge of Rear Wings.
You can speed up their training by investing in the Team Hub. This facility also increases their morale, making them perform their duties better and making it more likely they will renegotiate their contract with you to stay on the team.
Finding new talent
The final role on your staff isn’t focused on your race performance, they look to your team’s future. Under your direction, your scouts will spend days studying potential hires to reveal their stats and how likely they are to want to move from their current team.
You can use scouts to learn about new drivers, but you can also direct them to look into replacements for any of your primary staff. After all, a highly skilled Head of Aerodynamics may not get behind the wheel, but they can have as significant an impact on your team’s performance as a good driver can, especially if they stay with you for multiple seasons.
If your team isn’t performing as well as you’d like, as Principal, you should look not just at the drivers but also at the staff. A weak link can have broad ramifications, holding back a car’s development or leading to disappointing lap times on race day.
If you support your staff, keeping their training focused and morale high, they will elevate your team and get your driver within reach of pole position.