In the Season Challenge, you pick a rival from another team and make it your objective to beat them in best-of-three races. If you win this challenge, you will receive a contract from your rival's team which you can choose to accept if you wish.
Then there's the main career mode which is the biggest part of the game in terms of content. At the start of each race you can set a race strategy that helps you organise pit stops in advance. From here you can choose which laps you want to set a pit stop reminder for and which tyres you'll automatically be switched to at those times.
You can also set your fuel strategy, which is another important thing to master since you can't refuel during the race. Here, you can increase or decrease the amount of fuel you'll start with. You can cautiously add fuel, slowing your car down due to extra weight, but you won't have to manage your fuel usage as much. Or you can under-fuel the car, making it lighter but requiring more skill to heavily manage your fuel during the race to avoid running out. Your engineers will also set R&D challenges to help them with research for better upgrades, so you unlock better parts just by playing.
Champions Mode is a series of seven tough challenges, and each one is tricky racing scenario. In each of the first six your teammate is one of the champions. They're far ahead of you and in some kind of trouble, and you have to catch up and overtake them.
The final challenge pits you against all six of them at once on the new track in Austin, Texas. These challenges are hard but a lot of fun, like racing boss battles. Even though there are only seven of them, they should keep you occupied for a while and be a good measure of how your skills are progressing. They're great for when you need a break from the long haul races of campaign mode.
Racenet is an extra little section, requiring you to use a web browser to create a Codemasters Racenet account. At first this looks like just another
CoD Elite type thing - extra nonsense - but really it's a plain and simple community event.
One track is selected every few days for the entire community to race on. You race against the ghost of the fastest lap and your goal is to beat it. The leaderboard is on the Racenet website, and if you get the fastest lap your ghost will be taking everyone else on! This looks like a fantastic extra for the pros to test or show off their skill against the world and could be fun for everyone else to try out.
If you're not a fan of F1 or driving sim games in general, then this might not be for you. The realistic rules and etiquette can be toned down and there's a flashback option that lets you easily undo mistakes, but it's still quite a serious game. It's a lot of fun, but it's more serious fun. It puts you in the cockpit and in charge of your dedicated team who are there to help you every step of the way.
Pros:
+ Challenging goals
+ Helpful team on and off the track
+ Great immersion, making you feel like you're leading the team
Cons:
- A couple of small graphical annoyances
- Quite a specific are of interest, not for everyone
SPOnG Score: 7/10
