How The F1 Games Helped The Sport’s Hottest Prospect

When Liam Lawson got his first chance to race in Formula 1 in 2023 after AlphaTauri driver Daniel Ricciardo suffered seven hand fractures, few in the world of F1 expected him to do quite as well as he did. In a car that was usually towards the back of the pack he ended his first race in 13th after a chaotic Grand Prix in Zandvoort, then went two better at Monza to finish 11th.

But it was around the difficult street track of Singapore where he put in arguably his best performance. He out qualified the three other Red Bull drivers, including world champion Max Verstappen, and ended up finishing ninth, scoring his first points in F1 that come the end of the season would see him finish above two other drivers who had more races than him.

Obviously, years of experience in junior competitions along with a whole heap of talent were the main reasons for his success, but a tiny percentage was down to the F1 games he had been playing since he was young.

“My first F1 game was 2010, I played that game a lot when it came out, and then every year since then I pretty much played every single game,” said Lawson. “For me, the biggest thing was going to Singapore last year and driving it. Obviously, I’d done the development in the simulator, but it was also all the years of playing the F1 games [that helped]. Singapore was my favourite track, and I did it so many times that there was a massive resemblance when I drove in real life.”

Unlike a lot of the other tracks on the F1 calendar, Singapore is a track that is built for the F1 event and then returns to being city streets for the rest of the year, so there are very few opportunities for drivers outside of F1 to race it. This means that virtual recreations are “literally the only way to learn it,” according to Lawson, and knowing the F1 games helped him get up to speed quicker in the complex simulator AlphaTauri used.

While Lawson had always been a fan of racing games, especially the F1 titles, it wasn’t until the COVID lockdowns that he finally upgraded his sim racing gear and started to see the real benefits of competing virtually.

“At the time, I had a Logitech [an entry-level sim racing wheel], I did get a better simulator during that time, but we all just grabbed what we had and sort of made these rigs and started these online championships and just raced every single day,” recalled Lawson. “That side of it was really, really cool, and I think that honestly grew sim racing and showed the world, or at least people who didn’t believe it was so realistic, that actually it’s a lot closer than what people realised.”

Unfortunately for me, Liam’s comment about having a Logitech was a response to me trying to blame my poor skill level on my home equipment. So when it came time to jump on F1 24 in the fancy sim rig set up at the event in London to get some coaching from Liam the pressure was on. However, him telling the small crowd watching that there wasn’t much he needed to coach me on is something I will brag about until my last breath.

“At the time, I had a Logitech, I did get a better simulator during that time, but we all just grabbed what we had and sort of made these rigs and started these online championships and just raced every single day”

This year’s F1 game has proven divisive to say the least, specifically when it comes to the massively updated handling of the cars. The system has been completely reworked, with the idea of making the cars react more like they do in real life as well as fixing a number of the longstanding issues fans have had.

However, the community response since launching last week, and from creators who got hands-on early, is that the new system isn’t great and can be abused with unrealistic car setups and by driving in a way that no real driver would. It’s an issue, but one that Lawson, who had only had a brief time with the game when we spoke, didn’t seem too worried about.

“For me, I genuinely like the new characteristics of the car more, I just think there’s a way to exploit that, which is I think similar to what the community is sort of saying,” said Lawson. “If you drive within standard limits, or [how] you would in real life, the actual characteristics of the car are way better. There’s a lot more compliance, which is really cool and nice to feel. But there’s just those ways of exploiting at the moment where if you do that, then it can become unrealistic.”

If an actual F1 driver is saying this year’s game feels pretty good then I’m inclined to believe him, but that doesn’t mean that everyone else is wrong about how F1 24 feels to drive. While not confirming that a major overhaul is coming or that the team is actively working on such a patch, Lee Mather, senior creative director on F1 24, did reveal that they are already looking at how they can improve things based on player feedback.

“The community is never wrong. Everybody’s opinion is valid,” said Mather. “There are some portions of the audience where there are certain characteristics that they’re not gelling with. We’ve been working with those people, we’ve been talking to them regularly, and this year, the changes were quite significant.

“Now they’ve landed and they’re out in public, we can continue to work with the people who are playing it, get their feedback and you know, improve, finesse, change it in ways that will achieve the sort of the thing that people are looking for. But by and large, the reception has been incredible and we’re really pleased with that. There are areas that we can improve and we’ll continue to do so… There is that edge case where it can be exploited by certain ways of playing, and that’s what we’ll refine.”

With Lawson effectively having to sit this F1 season out as a reserve driver for Red Bull, F1 24 along with the fancy simulator at the team’s HQ will likely be the closest he gets to an F1 race before the 2025 season kicks off.

However, when that does arrive, he is expected to line up on the grid as a full-time driver, even if he was keen to say “there’s nothing guaranteed in the sport” and that he was still working on being on the grid next year. But the next time he does wait for the five lights to go out, there’s a good chance that at least some of his preparation work, even if it happened years ago, took place in the F1 games.