In my earlier years of racing, I couldn’t believe it whenever I spoke to a racecar owner or team manager who said that they actually preferred to not be the one behind the wheel. How could anyone not be interested in pushing a car to its limits and competing for the podium? As it turns out, the players behind the scenes of any race team are dealt equally difficult challenges, and they play every bit as important of a role as the driver to get a car to cross the finish line first. In order to give the public a sense of what it’s like to sit in the captain’s chair and lead a race team to victory, Playsport Games and SEGA built Motorsport Manager, a race team management simulator designed for PC, Mac and Linux operating system computers.

By Cameron Parsons

Team Leader

Believe it or not, there’s more to running a race team than simply telling your drivers to go faster. Taking on the manager role means you are the decision maker in all the forks in the road that involve budget, development, driver roster, car setup, pit strategy and more. Do you risk hiring a driver that’s aggressive but unpredictable, or one that will safely finish every race but rarely take a podium spot? Do you set up the car more for straight line speed or cornering capabilities?

Race Prep

Motorsport Manager shows no shortage of detail even before the green flag is waved. Playing as the manager, you can build and configure the core elements of the race team. This includes selecting drivers, engineers and mechanics. Each character that you select bring their own individual characteristics to the table. Beyond simple skill sets and budget demands, the personalities of these individuals affect how well they might work specific teammates. Adding to this, you must also manage relationships with sponsors. On top of the pre-event activities and options, you’re given a great amount of customization and development at your team’s headquarters. Here, you can visit different branch offices to manage items like vehicle development, driver training and even vote for rule changes throughout the season.

Going Racing

At this point, you better have all of your car and driver development dialed in. Before you start a race, you adjust options like fuel, tire and pit strategy, in an effort to maximize your drivers’ time spent racing as opposed to backing down for the sake of wear and maintenance. You can even make changes to the suspension, aerodynamics and gearing. These elements not only affect the car’s performance in straight lines and corners, but also how quickly the tires and parts may wear. When it comes down to laying down laps in qualifying and race sessions, you can monitor loads of data and receive feedback from your drivers. As you follow the cars circling the race course, illustrations and gauges show you fuel and tire status, vehicle condition and time gaps from other drivers.

Feel like you need to make some gains on track? Request the driver to raise their aggression, but keep an eye on tire wear and fuel consumption. When the time comes to make a pit stop, you make the decision on which components get repaired and how quickly the crew gets the job done. Prioritizing speed above all else of course makes for a quick stop, but also runs the risk of items getting overlooked or repaired improperly. If you successfully ride on the gray line of aggression versus risk, you may find your drivers coming out on top. Once you’ve basked in the glory of completing a race weekend, it’s back to headquarters to start planning for what’s next in the season.

Motorsport Manager Gameplay

Motorsport Manager offers a gaming experience that essentially goes as deep as you want it to. If you’re not interested in the fine details of budgets and vehicle development over the course of the season, you can jump straight into a quick race with basic settings. If you want to dig into all the features that this game has to offer, prepare to dump hours upon hours into building your race team into a season success. If you take a look at the videos and screenshots, you may feel overwhelmed with the amount of detail and customizability in the game. However, all of the options are laid out in an intuitive way that makes jumping in and playing for the first time less of a learning headache and more of a fun experience. As the races are run, you can slow down or speed up the pace in order to keep up with all of the vehicle and race information as it becomes unveiled. Making your management a little easier, the game will pause the race for you to interpret information and make decisions when catastrophic issues occur or when you need to plan out your next pit stop. I may be impatient, but I found myself running all of the races at an accelerated speed in order to keep things moving. Nevertheless, Motorsport Manager kept me on my toes from start to finish of each race. Ultimately, I landed a few top five finishes with cars that were smoking and falling apart as they took the checkered flag. As soon as the race completed, all I could think about was how I should strategize the next event.

Be on the lookout for Motorsport Manager this fall, as it will be released on PC, Mac and Linux platforms. For more information, you can visit www.motorsportmanager.com.