I don’t wish any specific ill on Max Verstappen’s racing career. The man likes playing video games until ungodly hours in the morning, doing everything he can to avoid Tik Tok, and Daniel Ricciardo. I, too, like all of those things – and I really can’t hate on a bloke with that much in common. I am, however, loving the fact that he’s currently not leading the F1 World Championship – for the first time since 2022. F1 in 2025 is subsequently feeling… a little fresher at the moment.
Has this year’s video game version arrived with the same freshness? For the most part, yes. F1 25 has brought with it the largest shake-up of the core ‘My Team’ career mode since it was introduced in F1 2020, and it’s a deeper and more satisfying way to play as a result. On circuit, it’s developer Codemasters’ most fabulous-looking effort to date, with a step up in lighting that has a noticeable impact on the quality of highlights and shadows. The AI is also extra impressive this year; consistently professional, racier than ever, and very convincing. Combine all this with a returning story mode that’s as bored with Verstappen winning every year as I am, and F1 25 handily slingshots itself around the outside of last year’s slightly inessential F1 24.
The new set-up for My Team discards the idea of you establishing an 11th F1 team as an old school owner/driver, and instead positions you as a conventional team principal managing a pair of drivers. At each grand prix you’ll choose which of your drivers to race as and, for the remainder of the time, you’ll need to supervise the entire operation that puts each of them into a $16 million race car, 24 weekends a year. That means managing budgets, building and upgrading new facilities that earn you various buffs (from R&D discounts to contract negotiation advantages, and many more), and assigning perks to your team principal that unlock a similar range of bonuses.
Now, I’d be lying if I said I’d ever taken issue with having an owner/driver at the helm of an F1 team in the modern era, which is the premise this mode had previously relied on since F1 2020. Yes, it wasn’t entirely believable in contemporary F1 – which is a whole different beast compared to the days of F1’s last team owner/driver: Jack Brabham back in the 1960s. Yes, it was a slightly silly fantasy. But, no, I’m not going to pretend the very concept of it ever grated on me.
After five years of the same shtick, however, it was definitely stale – so F1 25’s My Team does arrive as a welcome (and arguably overdue) revamp. The facility backgrounds are fresh, and the menus are new. There are some overarching similarities to the previous My Team mode (because the sport itself hasn’t profoundly changed in the last 12 months), but even at a glance there’ll be no confusing F1 25’s My Team mode with previous years.
Pitt Stop
Pleasingly, the management aspect is considerably deeper, with more moving parts to researching and developing new upgrades. Coaxing more speed and durability out of your race cars isn’t simply a matter of pressing on an upgrade and waiting for it to unlock and find itself fitted and ready to hit the track; now research that results in successful upgrades is only the first step. You still need to fabricate the parts themselves. Deeper into my second season in My Team, parts began to display weeks or months worth of days to finish production, but they would still come up as completed in what felt like a typical amount of time (that is, a few days to a week). It was a little annoying not knowing exactly when stuff would actually be ready, but this feels like an easily repairable bug.
At any rate, with dual production lines comes a whole new minefield to navigate. Initially you’ll only be able to build one part at a time, so you’ll need to manually select which of your drivers receives them before the other. That’s an interesting layer of politics to juggle, although I haven’t had any instances of favouritism to a single driver come back to bite me at this point (but perhaps the occasional wait for a single upgrade isn’t enough to have your other driver feel jilted).
The ability to choose which of your two drivers to race as at each GP also creates some pretty interesting tactical scenarios. Do you just focus on one driver and do your best to secure the drivers’ championship with them, or do you share your time across both and let the chips fall where they may? Unfortunately the driver market is disappointingly sparse. Where are the contracted reserve drivers? The F1 Academy drivers? From the outside looking in, it’s honestly odd that these personalities aren’t part of what the game gleans from being officially aligned with F1. Odder still when drivers like Perez, Ricciardo, Bottas, and Zhou are actually in F1 25, but marooned exclusively in the first half of the story mode (which begins in 2024).
Still, this expansion of My Team is well-timed, with Frontier’s short-lived F1 Manager series already seemingly over. It isn’t a like-for-like replacement, though, as opting to simulate a race weekend is essentially still brushed over in a black loading screen calculation. You can’t sit and watch a race unfold as team principal, issuing orders to your drivers or anything like that. This is a bit of a shame, as that would’ve been quite novel.
But perhaps it’s novel enough that you can enter the new My Team mode as the upcoming F1 movie’s fantasy team featuring Damson Idris, Javier Bardem, and Brad Pitt; or, at least you can in F1 25’s fancy ‘Iconic Edition.’ I will say, playing through an earnest motorsports management simulation as 1995’s People Magazine Sexiest Man Alive was not on my 2025 bingo card, but I did it, and I have no regrets.
The Butler Did It
On top of the reworked My Team mode, F1 25 also arrives with the series’ next shot at a singleplayer story mode, which turns the Braking Point saga into a trilogy. Picking up where the story left off in F1 23, Braking Point 3 continues the chronicles of the fictional F1 team Konnersport.
If you’ve played Braking Point in F1 23 and F1 2021, it probably won’t hold many surprises in terms of how the on-track action plays out. As before, you’ll be airdropped into race situations with specific goals to achieve – like holding up traffic for your teammate, or recovering positions after a puncture. Even without the story stitching them together, they’re a fun series of scenarios to tackle – though some of them have aged like milk over the course of F1 25’s two-year development cycle. Yeah, it was probably a little optimistic to have Liam Lawson absolutely dominating the field in a Red Bull Racing 1-2 in Vegas this season, but who knew? Well, other than Gasly. And Albon. And Perez.
It’s harmless, although it did temporarily distract me from how much better Vegas looks in F1 25. There are a lot of subtle details that elevate trackside authenticity this year, from real casinos replacing the generic signage the Vegas circuit track previously debuted with, to the more accurate blossom trees at Suzuka. It’s just a massive shame we don’t have any non-2025 championship tracks to substitute in and out as seasons progress, and I don’t know if the juice was worth the squeeze the reverse layouts of Silverstone, Zandvoort, and Red Bull Ring. There’s more to them than just having the cars all do a U-turn and race backwards – everything from the grid boxes to the marshalls have been modified to make it appear each of these circuits are legitimately being run in reverse – but they left me largely indifferent.
At any rate, it’s a serviceable story – and it’s one that’s honestly improved since its shift to focus on the flawed and fractured Butler family over initial lead character Aiden Jackson (who’s never really been fleshed out). To its credit, it’s also a mode you could argue was slightly ahead of the curve. That is, Braking Point itself may have followed in the wake of other sports game story modes like The Journey from FIFA 17 to 19, or Fight Night Champion’s titular Champion Mode, but it did handily beat this month’s F1 movie to the punch. Funnily enough, there’s also a scenario mode in F1 25 for the movie, with clips from the film. There’s only one mission so far but it’s a neat bonus.
Driver career mode is also back but, aside from a fresh injection of real driver radio recordings, it hasn’t changed. The entire intro to the mode being totally recycled from F1 24, dialogue and all, certainly doesn’t leave a great first impression. It’s just hard to get particularly motivated for what’s essentially a replay of F1 24 after playing the new My Team mode. Equally unmotivating is the returning service game component F1 World but, again, that’s on me. To be fair, the fact that it’s still a meaty single-player game for those who don’t value cosmetic trinkets or competing against strangers remains a core strength of F1 25. I feel like I’m just too old for Battle Passes and virtual clothing baloney.
On the subject of feel, handling feels broadly on par with F1 24, although the looser feel of old tyres is more pronounced – as is understeer when you’re dealing with the dirty air of cars ahead. It’s also a little harder to find the same amount of traction out of wet or slow speed corners that the AI can. I just found myself lighting up the rears a little more on F1 25, especially on controller, where the margin to find the perfect level of squeeze is so tiny on the travel distance of a trigger. The AI just seems to accelerate a lot more optimally in these situations. That’s probably my only major quibble with the AI, though, who make great moves to defend, leave appropriate room, and battle you (and each other) with tenacity without sacrificing self-preservation. Almost every tangle I’ve had with the F1 25’s AI over the past week has been my fault and, for a staunchly singleplayer slowcoach like me, that’s a huge plus.
