This has quickly become one of my favourite games to play on the deck. Really nice balance between casual and more intense. Long campaign with decent challenges to get to know the tracks.

Fantastic for local multiplayer, can tweak difficulty of AI, tracks and handling/speed of the cars to suit different skill levels. Competing for championships gets tense and addictive soon enough.

My only gripes are that there's no online MP, the settings menu is a bit bare, and AI GO SO SLOW IN THE PIT LANE that you can do cheaty overtakes there every time, but what's here is worth full price if you're looking for a more 'fun' f1 experience. Still get that feeling from weaving a few corners together perfectly.

One of the best F1 style arcade racing games ever made but it has some issues/missing features:
-No number of opponent setting, always 10 which can't be reduced/increased.
-No rear-view mirrors but good arrow indicators if opponents nearby/behind you.
-No qualifying sessions, always start at 10th place (except in career mode but only if use a perk).
-No race restarts in career mode (except if set a perk before the race).
-No crew photos in career menu, except when you get messages from them, making it more difficult to relate to who's who.
-No proper button used for upgrade screen: X button (on Xbox controller), instead of A which exits menu.
Nevertheless it has:
-Great custom championships option.
-Great controls and settings to turn on/off: damage, weather, pit stops.
-Great option of choosing the pace of the race based on eras (from slow speed 1980s to super fast 2020s with progressively higher top speeds & acceleration for each era).
-Great quick 1min or less lap times with pit stops around every 4-5laps which make for some fun, epic and strategic fuel/tire option races at higher lap counts (up to 99 laps).
-Great camera options, from a full cockpit view to a zoomed out forward angled top helicopter perspective.
-Great and unique career mode with crew happiness levels & perk bonuses that depend on text scenario questions/decisions between races.

It's a surprisingly in depth racing game. I thought it was just going to be Virtua Racer but there's a career mode spanning the last 4 decades of racing, with rivals (you can ♥♥♥♥ on other drivers and stuff) and the more they hate you the more aggressive they get and can do stuff outside of races, car upgrades, other teams upgrade their cars as the season progresses and quite a few tracks. You can rent car improvements off other teams and if they like or dislike you the price can go up or down. There's changing weather effects in the race and a forecast that isn't perfectly accurate. Car parts can wear and break and there's tire heat and stuff but it's not like I was expecting where all tyres wear the same, it changes based on cornering directions and breaking and stuff so they can wear at slightly uneven rates.

My main gripes are there's no marker to say 'this is how much fuel you need to do a lap when pitting so you have to do test runs to ballpark it, but after 2 trials and 4 laps of the GP you might forget 'was it 3 lines or 4?' You can pick a strategy and automate the process but I find a custom one is always much superior because it lets me do a one-stop strategy on soft tyres, not the mandatory hard otherwise.

The other gripe is about the morale of your staff, you're always pissing someone off, its unavoidable, whoever you pick gets a boost and whoever you don't gets a hit. So it becomes less about picking the response you want to over what you need to, sometimes there isn't even the right response, like one race I spun out and came 3rd or 2nd or something and it says 'who was to blame? pit crew or commercial!?' and I'm like '....me....?' but I can't pick that and blamed the most happy group, and why would it ever be commercial?

I'd give it an 8/10. The driving is simple enough even people who "hate all vehicle games" could enjoy it but complex enough to still be interesting.