Gaming: could the changes in 'My Team' make it F1 25's best mode?

F1 25 is nearing completion now, and as developer Codemasters gradually removes the cover from this year’s model in the weeks leading to launch, we’re learning about some significant changes to My Team mode. 

You remember the one: first introduced for F1 20, it was that highly enjoyable and slightly implausible proposition in which you played a driver-manager, in charge of all the hiring and firing, and also the one who hopped in the car on Sunday. 

That driver-manager concept is gone for F1 25, as demonstrated in the game’s latest deep dive video. Instead, you play the role of the team principal and recruit two drivers, then pick which one of the pair you’d like to control before each race weekend.

As much as we enjoyed being the all-powerful god-king of motorsport in previous iterations, that does make a bit more sense. Even legends like Alain Prost and Jackie Stewart took a few years to transition from one role to the other.

In order to sign drivers, you’ll need to enter multi-stage negotiations with them. It sounds like there’s some risk and reward to weigh up here, since you’ll get more favourable contract terms by courting them for longer, but also risk the talks being made public and upsetting your existing drivers the longer they go on for.

There’s an interesting roster of real F1 drivers, youth prospects, esports racers, fictional characters from the series’ 'Braking Point' mode and legendary alumni like Schumacher, Senna, Hakkinen, Villenueve et al to pick from, and F1 25’s included a lot more control over who’s in the talent pool this time.

You can select whether driver icons can be recruited by AI teams now, plus you can go even more granular and enable or disable specific drivers. So if you want to let in only real F1 veterans but no esports racers, that’s your call. We spotted Callie Mayer from Braking Point in the contract talks cut-scenes, for example, so if it’s simply too weird to watch her and her team-mate Jarno Opmeer battling Mark Webber for the championship, just head to the options menu.

The ability to choose which driver to race as for each race weekend is intriguing, too. We can imagine scenarios where we want to wingman the championship hopeful to victory by controlling the second driver for part of the season, then swap seats and take the glory in the deciding round. Sounds like there’ll be plenty of emergent scenarios that will add meaning to that decision each round.

Back to being the team principal, though: aside from recruiting drivers, you’re also in charge of running an all-new team facility, managing the team’s finances to avoid exceeding the cost cap, and overseeing research and development, now split into two different processes.

Previously R&D was one menu: you picked the new part you wanted to spend resource points developing, and it magically appeared on your car a few weeks later.

In F1 25, though, researching the part and then actually manufacturing it and fitting it to the car are two different stages. Only once a part has been successfully researched can you move it through into development and tell the factory to start making units, before finally fitting those components to the cars when they’re made. It looks like this system will make its way to Driver Career mode, too, so you’d better get good at keeping a nice healthy inventory of front wings.

This mode’s all about building up your team into a dominant force by upgrading your facilities, and there seems to be an impressive amount of detail to how this actually works in the revamped My Team. Each department can be upgraded separately, and its headcount increased.

Your team principal avatar has their own upgrade tree, too, with unlockable perks for things like quicker resource point accumulation and cash boosts.

Finally, the accolades system from F1 24 which rewarded you for hitting specific milestones makes its way into F1 25’s My Team. In this context it builds up your Fan Rating, which in turn boosts drivers’ perception of your team, unlocks higher sponsor loyalty and more lucrative sponsorship opportunities, along with perks like cheaper upgrade costs in your facility.

That’s a lot, then. Codemasters has astutely identified that My Team’s a real slow burn, long-form mode that players want to spend a long time in, and so packed the mode full of long-term objectives to hunt down and numerous upgrade currencies to accumulate in order to achieve the ultimate goal: absolutely creaming everyone with your perfect car and making the sport interminably boring for everyone except fans of your team. Thankfully that could never happen in the real sport.

F1 25 arrives on 30 May for PC, PlayStation and Xbox consoles. In the meantime, it’s worth keeping an eye on the official site’s news channel, where the studio’s posting regular deep dives into all the modes on offer.