F1 25 Hands-on Preview: What's new in My Team and Career Mode?

Okay, let's get this out of the way right off the bat. If you saw the recent full reveal of Codemasters' F1 25, you'll be familiar that the game has plenty of promising improvements and returning ideas. There's LiDAR scanned tracks, the third Braking Point instalment, adjustments to My Team, and so much more. While we will be able to tell you about many of these things soon, in today's hands-on preview we can only focus on Career Mode and My Team. So, for thoughts on some of the other elements, which are publicly available announcements, you will have to wait a little longer...

But anyway, let's get right into the meat of this preview by first of all speaking about Career Mode. To be frank, there's not a whole lot here that you will really notice as a change. The Career has always been one of F1's best features, which is why it's not exactly a surprise that Codemasters is sticking to its guns. All the core parts of being able to choose a team and a driver and then experience 10 seasons of Formula 1 racing is back once more, except now a little more refined, with tweaks and improvements in some of the more menial and less exceptional areas in former instalments. Interviews are less awkward and more believable, off-track activities are slightly more engaging, and the actual race weekend prep and Grand Prix action is as thrilling as ever. Codemasters will tell you about a bunch of adjustments that they've made here, but as is the case in EA Sports FC, PGA Tour 2K, and mostly every other sports title, this year's F1 Career Mode is just a marginally more refined attempt at the current formula.

My Team is quite a bit different, but before I get to what is changing in this mode, let's talk a tad about the thing that everyone is most interested in: the racing. F1 25 is a stark improvement over F1 24 for all wheel or sim-rig users. The game feels much more responsive and less frustrating to drive, all while offering the various intricacies that make any simulated racer excel. The gameplay is familiar but tight, the graphics stunning, the opposing drivers tricky to beat when set to a higher difficulty, and this is all while presenting a driving feel that doesn't exist on such a knife's edge that the slightest mistake will see you careering off into a wall.

On controller, the game is a bit wonkier, offering a much more challenging handling system to master, one where finding the limit is more difficult due to lacking the precision that comes with a wheel and pedals. Still, it functions about as well as you would expect, and I would go as far as to say that this year's game will be offering a much better and more complete driving experience.

Anyway, My Team. This mode is genuinely seeing quite a few changes. The former dynamic where the player would take on the role of a bizarre owner-driver combo is now gone, and instead you play two more separated roles.

The first is the owner that takes on all of the management and business-centric tasks. This could be setting the team up in the first place - which now presents much more complex customisation mechanics to allow you to create more believable and varied liveries - but also choosing your driver pairing and signing the best contracts, accepting the most achievable sponsor deals, leading the team down the right research and development path, managing finances, and all while keeping tabs on your fan rating. This is a new system that basically sees how well-liked your team is. An established organisation like Ferrari or Mercedes-AMG will have a very high rating due to former success or its historic past, whereas teams like Haas will have lower ratings, due to their relative infancy and typically poorer results. In My Team, the challenge as the owner will be to increase this fan rating and thus make your team the one to beat.

There's also HQ updates that further give you responsibility with the management and staffing side of running a Formula 1 team. It isn't nearly as complex as what Frontier Developments offered in its F1 Manager series, but it works and it's more engaging than what was formerly available in the racing title.

As per the driver role, here you will take on the duties of one of the two options you sign at the start of the season. Essentially, gone is the idea of constantly prioritising your character over your driver pairing, as now the aim is to ensure team success by helping both driver's thrive on and off the track.

All in all, My Team is similar to what we used to see, except a lot of the wonkier and weirder elements that we tended to ignore in past F1 games have been addressed and now make much more sense. Oh, and in this game mode, it's worth noting that you will always play as the 11th team on the grid. That could be your own creation, the fictional Konnersport organisation from Braking Point, or the APX GP organisation from the upcoming live-action film.

It may sound like F1 25 is quite similar to previous games, and while it's definitely not a major change to the format (ultimately mirroring the real F1 in perhaps its least admirable way), there are a few really promising and exciting changes planned, but you'll have to stay tuned to hear more about those.