Players have been begging for red flags to return to the F1 games for years, and in F1 23 they finally do. Codemasters made a big point about the inclusion of the race-stopping flag for this year's game, but it may already be broken.
Players gained access to F1 23 on 13 June, and while we didn't experience a red flag during our F1 23 review plenty of players now have. It looks like this flag is causing a serious problem. One that should hopefully be fixed by a patch soon but until then may mean you have to disable red flags.
Red flag bug
There doesn't seem to be an issue with triggering red flags, instead it comes afterwards. When you get a red flag in F1 23 every car returns to the pitlane, you can make changes to tyres, fix some damage, and adjust race strategy.
The race then restarts from the grid in the order that it was when the red flag dropped. That's great. However, it seems like the game doesn't recognise the rest of the race as having happened.
Once you cross the finish line, whatever happened from the restart to then is forgotten, and standings revert to what they were when the red flag occured.
This bug hit former F1 Esports champion Jarno Opmeer in his opening My Team race and has been reported by other players on Facebook and Reddit.
It's unfortunate that such a hyped up new feature doesn't work properly from launch, and may well have been a reason why the red flag has been absent from the series for so long.
We hope that this can get fixed in the inevitable flurry of patches that follow a game release. With the official release date of F1 23 being 16 June the game is likely to see a big patch on Monday 19 June that will hopefully correct this bug.
How to turn off red flags
Until it is patched you might want to turn red flags off. To do that you need to head to the "rules and flags" section of the Grand Prix setting screen.
From there you can select red flags and scroll left to turn them off entirely.
It's worth noting that if you race at 25% distance or lower that red flags are off automatically. So this only affects those that race at 35%, 50%, or full race distance.