F1 22’s new cars: When to use assists, and how to drive without them

It just happened eventually.

The engine didn’t change. The torque through the rear axle didn’t change. The clutch pedal, tighter than an eight-day clock, sure didn’t change. I don’t feel like I changed, either. But in the spring of 1990 I finally figured out how to operate my mother’s manual transmission BMW 325e. From being incapable of getting the car to move, to being able to cruise around Kiawah Island without it stalling out, I was a pro at this.

Similar experiences await you. F1 22, even if — maybe especially if — you’re a series veteran with thousands of miles in track time. The new cars, as is the case in the real-life vehicles they emulate, have an unavoidable learning curve, and the AI drivers are much stronger, especially as they aren’t the ones learning on the job. The car I was reviewing F1 22Two weeks ago I was convinced there could be no escape from the traction control assistance for gamepad owners. My car was spinning out on the slightest acceleration using the same control-and-assist regime as last year’s game.

It was like the spring in South Carolina that I finally found something: I could race! F1 22’s sleek new models on a gamepad without traction control after all, which means I can run faster and tick the AI difficulty up four or five spots. Lee Mather, Codemasters’ creative director, said I am not the only one making these breakthroughs.

“Something which we very commonly see is, there’s a placebo effect, when we put a patch out, people think we’ve changed things that we’ve gone nowhere near,” Mather said. “We’ve already seen feedback from the patch that’s gone live [on July 7], relating to things that we’ve not been anywhere near.”

Image: Codemasters/Electronic Arts

Simply put, it is two weeks. F1 22’s launch, folks are starting to get it, and aren’t giving themselves enough credit for getting it. Codemasters does plan to rebalance the cars’ torque and throttle behavior — but not until the next patch. And it doesn’t sound like it’s a huge overhaul, either. “There’s a few things that we’d identified ourselves that we wanted to make some small adjustments to,” Mather said.

Drivers in the game’s always restive subreddit may be happy to hear that — or disappointed that the changes are small — but if the message from Mather is that Codemasters believes in the authenticity and playability of what it has launched, then its fans should believe they’re capable of playing it. Just need to get used to the changes.

Players shouldn’t be afraid to turn on assists such as traction control, or braking — especially when they’re learning how to take a standing start. But they also need to pay attention to the cars’ behavior, and not be afraid of adjusting the calibration, particularly if they are playing on a gamepad, as most F1 22 players do.

“People get into a strange mindset of, ‘I shouldn’t use assists, I should be good enough to beat this,’ But that’s not always the case,” Mather said. “The assists are there to make the game a pleasurable experience. Never be afraid to use the tools available for the benefit of your player. […] Don’t force yourself to try and learn to play in a certain way when the tools are there to, actually, make the game play how you want to.”

Gamepad players shouldn’t be afraid to tinker with the throttle and brake linearity on their inputs, which is found in the settings menu, under the Controls, Vibration, and Force Feedback tile in the Calibration selection. You don’t need an advanced controller, like the Xbox Elite Series 2, to give yourself more granular control over how high you’re revving the engine. I drove with a 40 throttle linearity last year; it’s down to 23 this year. This may seem counterintuitive as the throttle linearity causes the trigger to be less responsive at the beginning than it is at its end. But I’ve found that it helps feather my acceleration and move more smoothly to full throttle.

If your advanced controller had dead zones that you used to adjust the throttle for acceleration, you should remove them. This extra room is necessary to exit the corner smoothly.

“I think we ran a race earlier [last] week,” Mather said, “It was a created race where we had content creators from the F1 world racing against content creators from the FIFA world,” Mather said. “The final was actually a really good mix of FIFA and F1 players. This instantly demonstrated that handling changes are making for some amazing racing. Many of the F1 content creators used full-rigs that included pedals and wheels. Some of the FIFA guys also had them. […]I chose to use a gaming pad. And the two were still brilliant; it was very competitive.”

Other than the new cars’ handling and learning curve, the other howls of protest rising from veteran F1 players in the game’s first week concerns the pace of the AI drivers, especially relative to the created car that players get and build up through the popular My Team career. Mather states that this year’s bot cars run faster. Like always F1 22’s AI governs raw pace (with AI increments of 1 accounting for a difference between 0.15 and 0.2 seconds in track time) as much as aggression and how much room bot drivers leave others.

So if you’re getting mowed down on the long straights at Spain, or Baku, for heaven’s sake back the difficulty down. In Spain, I was able to race at 97 AI. F1 22; I’m at 84 this year. Mather said the faster-paced AI is there because “it gives us more ceiling for players who are those ‘aliens’ who race at a really high difficulty level.”

Reddit genius phail216 created this invaluable matrix to help you understand the AI’s speed and how it works. This shows track-by-track times for every AI setting, from 1 through 110. You should run multiple laps. F1 22’s Time Trial mode at a particular track, pick your best lap (or the average, or the median, whatever you feel most represents your qualifying performance) and compare it to the chart. There’s your AI setting. It appears to be modeled on F1Laps.com’s data, which is a community site with premium options — but most of its useful information, including setups and track AI calibration, is available for free.

Image: Codemasters/Electronic Arts

Features added F1 22, which seem to be there for more casually interested fans brought in by the sport’s surging popularity, are still helpful to advanced drivers. Long-time Supercars fans have been critical of the Supercars, with many wishing that they would bring back F1 cars from decades past. But the slower and heavier street-legal cars, in a Time Trial lap, helped familiarize me with Miami, Portugal, and Saudi Arabia, the three tracks I’ve driven the least. Mather said developers were aware early on that Supercars — which are unlocked in gameplay, and not as microtransactions — had a tutorial use.

“I think that’s something we’ve always struggled with in Formula One, is that you’re literally thrown into the fastest cars in the world, on very difficult circuits,” Mather said. He pulled out an example involving Milestone’s MotoGP racing simulation that matched my experience completely: “I don’t play bike racing games very often, and when I do, I arrive at the corner at such a speed that I’ve tipped in at the wrong point, and I go straight off,” Mather said. “Whereas, if I was able to learn it at a slightly slower pace, I would understand that.

“So if you start driving a Supercar first, you realize the braking distances are massive,” he continued, “so by the time you reach that track in a Formula One car, you might be braking way too early — but that’s better than braking way too late. The whole point of the Supercars, outside of the challenges and other exciting things you do with them, is that they give players a great learning opportunity.”

“Something we’ve always wanted to get across to players is just how much more advanced than pretty much any other form of motorsport a Formula One car is,” Mather said. “When you put it against the really, really fast road cars we’ve got in the game, when you see their differences, it really highlights what a Formula One car is capable of.”