Right on the Button.
I was floored back in June by the trailer for Motorsport Manager, an iOS open-wheel racing sim that former Hello Games dev Christian West has been building by himself for the past year. It was just beautiful to look at, which isn’t something a rational person ever expects from a game of this variety.
Sports management games are such rarities that those of us who enjoy them are more than happy to accept them as cantilevered spreadsheets with a bare minimum of video game tinsel. I still remember when the big feature in a new Out of the Park Baseball game was sound effects. This was in like 2007, by the way, not during the Reagan administration.
I’ve been playing a preview build of Motorsport Manager over the weekend, and I can tell you first-hand that, yup, there’s sound effects. Generally speaking, the high-gloss presentation completely lives up to the expectations set by the trailer. But let’s see what else is in there.
My team’s fans were second-guessing my qual strategy on the in-game Twitter. Everybody’s a critic.
In Motorsport Manager, you are the owner of a racing team that starts in a fictionalised low-tier British or Aussie competition (think GP3), trying to work your way up to the top flight of competition. In-between races your control is at a very high level: you’re signing contracts with sponsors and expanding R&D facilities while keeping one eye on the team’s bottom line. In this respect, Motorsport Manager resembles James Black’s delightful featherweight soccer sim Football Chairman, another game that streamlined the sports management sim into something more… well, manageable.
If you were expecting Motorsport Manager to have the deep individual spark plug modelling of an old classic like Grand Prix Manager 2 – that’s not what this is. You aren’t making technician-level decisions about ballast or toe angles. On the car development side of things, your job is to allocate budgets and let the boffins get on with it. But on race day, things are different.
You can get away with racing slicks on a wet track — for a little while.
Every race weekend features a qualifying day and then the race itself. You choose the car’s basic setup for each track (focus on acceleration or top speed? straightaway speed or cornering aerodynamics?), choose tires, and decide how hard you want your drivers (who are rated on overtaking, consistency, and other attributes) to push versus nursing those rapidly-deteroriating tires. Motorsport Manager is rather hands-off most of the time, but on race weekend it breaks out the tactical decisions you expect from a racing sim.
All of this is presented in a beautifully self-assured package. The UI has a clean-lined iOS 7 feel about it and the races themselves (which play out in real-time but can be sped up if you don’t want to watch all 20-odd laps) are animated on a 3D race course with a striking tilt-shift visual effect.
Motorsport Manager isn’t massively complex — but it’s clearly made by someone with a deep love of the sport. The app is filled with delightful world-building details like tweets from your team’s fans (and from your occasionally cranky drivers), random off-track events, and charmingly designed (and humorous) sponsor logos. It’s a time-waster, but it’s a time-waster made by a gear-head for gear-heads, and it’s easy to fall down a “one more race” rabbit hole where a five-minute session turns into an hour.
West has submitted the game to Apple and he’s hoping to launch it in mid-August. I’ll let you know when he’s got a specific date in mind. Until then, you can follow him on Twitter.
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