F1 2021 has transitioned seamlessly to the next generation of consoles. The new official Formula 1 game brings a number of new features to the table, including expert racing style.
What is expert racing style and how do you activate it? We've got everything you need to know right here!
How to activate
Every single player mode has expert style available. Braking Point, Career Mode and My Team all have expert style on offer, but it's My Team where it really shines.
Contrary to what you may believe, expert style has nothing to do with the difficulty you're choosing to race on. You can, if you want, race with assists like ABS and traction control and with the AI turned down with expert style.
What expert style does is allow players to change the finer details of their single-player mode to ensure that the difficulty and level of realism is right for them.
There are a few ways to activate expert style, but the easiest is to do so within a race weekend. Something new for F1 2021 is that you can change your race settings between sessions. This is a change from previous games, where you could only do so between race weekends.
Load your My Team save and go into your workstation by pressing X on PS/A on Xbox. Then press Triangle on PS/ Y on Xbox to enter the settings menu. Choose a submenu from here, it doesn't matter which one. From there, you should have the option to change the race style in the top-right. Cycle through using triangle/Y until you get to expert.
Career Settings
There are a lot of preferences that become unlocked when you go to expert style in F1 2021's My Team mode. These aren't all of the settings available, just the ones that are exclusively available in expert. We begin with the Career Settings:
- Alter how fast or slowly your team and the AI-controlled teams earn acclaim, resource points and cash.
- Alter how fast or slowly you and the AI-controlled drivers earn acclaim.
- Change the rate of mechanical failures for the AI your own car (having these on standard and high allow the player's car to fail during a race for the first time ever!)
Telemetry settings
For the first time ever as well, you'll be able to download your own telemetry to your computer and look at it between sessions. There won't be anywhere near as much as the real Formula 1 drivers get, but this is a huge development and something we didn't have any of before.
Other settings
Aside from the career and telemetry settings, most of the preferences remain the same in F1 2021. We've screenshotted the settings screens though, so have a look and see if there's anything new you can spot!
There are so many options here that it honestly feels like modding. Expert racing style is something that we didn't even know we needed, but we're so glad it's here. And yes, expert racing style is available on old-gen consoles as well as the PS5 and Series X versions of the game.
Codemasters have moved the F1 games closer to a real simulator in F1 2021 while retaining the elements of the game which make it fun to the casual fan. That's no mean feat, our hats are off to you on this one, Codies!
Some may perceive this to be allowing for an unfair advantage over the AI, but that's not true. Players have the option to nerf themselves rather than the AI as well as the other way around, so Codemasters aren't encouraging cheating in any sense.