F1 2019 Spins The Wheel

With scripted drama and F2 racing, F1 2019 spins the wheel.

- Phil Iwaniuk

It seems obvious now in retrospect. The best way for an annualized, licensed motorsport game to stay fresh every summer when the latest iteration trots out onto the Steam Store is, clearly, to chuck in an entirely different racing series as well. With the inclusion of the 2018 F2 championship, F1 2019 feels for the first time in the series like a wider world of motorsport, offering that irresistible rags-to-riches journey in career mode and a handling model all of its own to master.

It makes a lot of sense. Codemasters has had the handling down for years now, twitchy and frightening, and giving just the right amount of rumble in your hands as you wrestle your car implausibly fast over an impeccably rendered apex. It needed to add something more than a few handling tweaks, and it did just that by placing a tier of racing below F1, and thus making a contract with the big boys feel like more of a big break.

The way it’s brandished in F1 2019’s career mode is a bit of a surprise, though. Rather than a full season of F2 racing, it’s a scripted sequence of condensed race highlights akin to Codemasters’ beloved TOCA: Race Driver which kicks off your journey to F1.

Fictionalized drivers Lukas Weber and Devon Butler mix with familiar names like Russell, Norris, and Ghiotto, and the former are very much cut from the ‘broadly drawn racing stereotype’ cloth.