F1 Manager 2022 Setup Guide: How to set the car up for EVERY track & driver

Your driver could be Ayrton Senna reborn but without the right setup they won't be going anywhere fast, welcome to our F1 Manager 2022 setup guide!

Just like in F1 22, you need to get a strong setup for every track you visit. However, there's no endless time trial mode for you to tweak things.

Fortunately, we have been experimenting and discovering the best ways for you to create your setups!

F1 Manager 2022 setup guide

As we mentioned, you are limited to the three practice sessions of the race weekend to create your setup.

There is also no meta for you to take advantage of like there is in F1 22. Instead, each setup needs to be bespoke and tailored to the preferences of the driver.

So how do you go about creating the ideal setup for your drivers?

The basics

With each setup in F1 Manager 2022 you are trying to balance five performance aspects of the car: Oversteer, braking stability, cornering, traction, and straights.

The ideal range for each aspect is represented by a blue bar. At the start of FP1 these bars are massive, but as your drivers put the laps in the range will narrow and narrow, letting you hone in on the ideal setup.

To shift the bias of the car you have five sliders: Front wing angle, rear wing angle, anti-roll distribution, tyre camber, and toe-out.

Each one influences a group of the five aspects, making setup creation a puzzle mini-game that you have to crack.

Now that we know what our tools are and what we are aiming for, where do we start?

Building confidence

You only know if the setup is any good when the driver tells you, but to get feedback from the driver they need to put the laps in!

So at the start of FP1 you should fuel up the car for about 20 laps, bolt on a set of hard tyres, and just let them go out and pound around the track.

Depending on the circuit you can make some initial tweaks before that first run. At Monaco you can put wing angle on and at Monza you can take it off, but most circuits want a careful balance.

Still, the front and rear wings are the only tools you have to impact performance on the straights. So start by dialing in the wings, then go from there.

Once your driver has done enough laps the feedback indicator on the top right of your driver box will move to 5/5 and turn blue. You'll then get a radio message of them chatting with their engineer.

How long this takes actually depends on the quality of your Race Engineer, so make sure you hire a good one!

Once the driver has full feedback to provide, be it good or bad, call them into the pits and get to work making adjustments.

Tweaking away

After each run the bars will narrow and you can begin to tweak each setting to get the bias into the right range.

Anti-roll distribution has a huge impact on traction, and a slightly lesser one on oversteer. So once the wings are done use that to narrow in on oversteer and traction.

Then it's tyre camber and toe-out to tweak the braking stability and cornering.

As you go you might need to make a little adjustment to the front wing to get some oversteer back, or to the rear wing to get some traction.

The more changes you make the longer it will take your pit crew to get the car ready to go out, but you'll rarely be spending more than four or five minutes waiting for the team to do their thing.

Then bolt on some tyres, fuel up, and send the car back out.

It's then a game of rinse & repeat, with each run and setup test further narrowing the ideal range for each driver.

You want to keep going until you've got setup confidence of around 75%. The higher the better though so don't stop there!

Why setups matter

When you are driving in a game you want a setup that suits you as it allows you to drive faster, and the principle is the same in F1 Manager 2022.

The more confidence a driver has in the setup of the car, the faster they will be. This is reflected in an attribute boost for the race.

You can get a maximum of 15 points added to your driver's attributes in a race. Three of them come from track acclimatisation (which is just doing laps of the circuit) and three come from car parts knowledge (how comfortable they are with the suspension, wings etc) but NINE come from their setup confidence.

You can get a +3 boost to Control, Accuracy, Cornering, Braking, and Reactions if you max out all three of the Practice Goals. The driver ratings are crucial to reducing lap time out on the track.

So while you might want to just skip practice or let the AI handle it, you really should take command and guide your drivers to the best setups for them.

After all, why else are you the Team Principal?!