I have no particular bad intentions for Max Verstappen’s racing career. The man enjoys playing video games until the wee hours of the morning and does his best to stay away from Daniel Ricciardo and TikTok. All of those things appeal to me as well, so I can’t be critical of a guy who has so many interests. For the first time since 2022, he isn’t in the lead in the Formula One World Championship, which I like. As a result, F1 in 2025 is currently feeling a little more youthful.
Has the video game version for this year arrived as fresh as last year? Generally speaking, yes. With the biggest overhaul of the fundamental “My Team” career option since its debut in F1 2020, F1 25 offers a more profound and fulfilling gaming experience. It’s developer Codemasters’ most amazing-looking work yet on the circuit, with improved lighting that significantly affects the clarity of the highlights and shadows.
This year, the AI is especially remarkable; it is always professional, more nimble than before, and incredibly convincing. F1 25 easily slingshots itself around the periphery of last year’s, perhaps unnecessary F1 24, when you combine all of this with a returning story mode that is as tired of Verstappen winning every year as I am.
Instead of having you start an 11th Formula One team as an old-fashioned owner/driver, the new My Team setup puts you in the role of a traditional team principal overseeing two drivers. You will select which of your drivers will compete in each grand prix, and you will be responsible for overseeing the entire process that gets each driver into a $16 million race car every weekend of the year. This entails handling finances, constructing and renovating new facilities that grant you a variety of benefits (such as contract negotiation advantages and R&D reductions), and giving your staff principal benefits that open up a comparable array of bonuses.
Now, I would be lying if I claimed to have ever objected to an owner/driver leading an F1 team in the present day, which is the assumption this mode had previously made since F1 2020. Indeed, it wasn’t realistic in modern Formula One, which is a very different animal than it was in the 1960s, when Jack Brabham was the final team owner and driver. Yes, the fantasy was a little absurd. However, I won’t pretend that the idea of it ever annoyed me.
F1 25s My Team is a welcome (and perhaps long overdue) update.
However, it was undoubtedly stale after five years of the same thing; thus, F1 25‘s My Team does come as a welcome (and perhaps long overdue) update. Both the menus and the facility backgrounds are new. Although the sport itself hasn’t altered much in the past 12 months, there are some general parallels to the previous My Team mode, but even at first glance, F1 25’s My Team mode won’t be confused with prior years.
Pitt Stop
Fortunately, the management component is far more complex, with numerous moving components for investigation and the creation of new enhancements. Now, research that leads to successful upgrades is just the first step. Achieving greater speed and durability in your race cars is more complex than simply pressing an upgrade and waiting for it to be fitted and ready to hit the track. The parts still need to be made by hand.
Parts in My Team started showing weeks or months of production days as I got farther into my second season, but they would still appear as finished in what seemed like a normal length of time (a few days to a week). Not knowing exactly when things will be ready was a little unpleasant, but this seems like a fixable defect.
At each GP, you can select which of your two drivers to compete as, which leads to some intriguing tactical situations. Do you split your attention between the two drivers and let things happen naturally, or do you concentrate on just one and try your hardest to win the drivers’ championship with them? Regretfully, the driver market is surprisingly small. The hired reserve drivers are nowhere to be found. The drivers of the F1 Academy? When viewed from the outside, it’s somewhat strange that these figures don’t contribute to the benefits the game receives from its formal affiliation with Formula One.
Even bizarre is the fact that drivers like Perez, Ricciardo, Bottas, and Zhou are only present in the first part of the story mode (starting in 2024), even though they are actually in Formula One 25.
However, given that Frontier’s brief F1 Manager series appears to be coming to an end, this My Team addition comes at a good moment. However, choosing to mimic a racing weekend is still essentially ignored in a black loading screen computation, so it’s not a like-for-like alternative. As a team principal, you cannot sit and watch a race go on while giving your drivers commands or anything similar. It’s a little unfortunate because that would have been original.
The Butler Did It
In addition to the revised My Team option, F1 25 introduces the series’ next attempt at a single-player narrative mode, completing the Braking Point trilogy. Braking Point 3 continues the history of the fictional F1 team Konnersport, where the tale left off in F1 23.
You won’t be surprised by the on-track action if you’ve played Braking Point in Formula One 23 and Formula One 2021. As previously mentioned, you will be airdropped into race scenarios with predetermined objectives to meet, such as regaining places following a puncture or holding up traffic for a colleague. Though some of them have aged like milk over the time of F1 25’s two-year production cycle, they’re still a fun set of scenarios to tackle even without the tale connecting them. Liam Lawson’s complete dominance of the field in a Red Bull Racing 1-2 in Vegas this season was maybe a bit optimistic, but who could have predicted that? Except for Gasly, that is. Albon, too. Perez, too.
Verdict
In addition to a conclusion for the story mode, which started as a brief prologue back in F1 2019 (and became a mode of its own in F1 2021), F1 25 begins with the first significant overhaul of the basic “My Team” career mode since it was initially launched in F1 2020. Although the driver career mode doesn’t do much to set itself apart from its debut in F1 24, taken as a whole, F1 25 is a much better and more comprehensive product than the previous year’s release.
It’s by far the best series since the fan favorite F1 2020, though there are still a few areas where it falls painfully short of its full potential. I’ll never be able to understand its obsession with clothes and emotes over meaningful classic F1 cars and content.
