F1 Manager 23 Setup Guide: How To Get 100% Car Setup Every Time (2024)

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Car setups in F1 Manager 23 are just as important in this management game as they are in F1 23. While car setups in F1 23 will make your car easier to drive and faster.

In F1 Manager 23, car setups will provide nice bonuses for your drivers which will make them drive faster and more consistently during qualifying and the race. If you really want to maximise your driver’s pace in F1 Manager 23, you need to master car setups.

In this guide, I’m going to show you exactly how car setups work in F1 Manager 23, which is essentially a mini-game that you play throughout the practice sessions.

I’ll then show you how to get 100% setup satisfaction with both drivers every race weekend.

Watch our F1 Manager 23 car setup video

This video runs through the whole process of achieving 100% setup satisfaction with both cars easily every race. If you would rather read our how-to guide, continue scrolling past the video.

How car setups work in F1 Manager 23

Car setups in F1 Manager 23 work in almost the exact same way they did in last year’s F1 Manager game. You get five different options to tweak, which in turn change your driver’s confidence as well as the characteristic of the car.

In F1 Manager 23, the 5 individual areas of the car setup that you can change are;

• Front wing angle
• Rear wing angle
• Anti-Roll distribution
• Tyre camber
• Toe-out

What is driver set-up satisfaction?

As well as the car setup options on the left of the screen, you’ll also notice five additional blue bars in the middle of the screen. This indicates your drivers setup satisfaction.

The 5 areas that make up your overall driver’s setup satisfaction are;

• Oversteer
• Braking stability
• Cornering
• Traction
• Straights

It is important to say right away that the actual car setup on the left isn’t track dependant. For example, you don’t necessarily need to reduce the front and rear wing for fast tracks like Monza or Spa-Francorchamps.

Instead, you just need to focus on moving the setup bars to keep the white bars in the middle of the screen inside the blue bar range.

How the car setup affects driver satisfaction

While tweaking your car setup in the left panel, you will notice the white bar on the right-hand side moves, with different areas of the car setup changing various elements in the setup satisfaction screen.

The goal when tweaking your car setup is to ensure the white bar in the setup satisfaction screen remains within the blue range.

During the practice sessions, as you put in more and more runs, the blue bars will shrink, making it harder to keep the white bars within the blue bars.

To the right of each area of the car setup, you will see the driver feedback. This will range from bad to good, great and optimal. Then below this feedback is a percentage which indicates how close to a perfect 100% car setup you are.

Every time your driver completes a long enough stint on track, these setup comments will change to indicate how close you are to the perfect setup in each area. The blue bars will also shrink after each practice run.

How important are car setups?

During a race weekend in F1 Manager 23, your goal is to increase your driver’s preparation and driver confidence. The driver preparation is an indicator that ranges from 0 to 100% and is visible during practice sessions. This increases by improving your driver’s track acclimatisation, car parts knowledge and car setup satisfaction.

When you get to qualifying and the race, the driver preparation then affects your overall driver confidence. The higher your driver’s confidence, the better your driver will perform during qualifying and the race.

One of the biggest impacts on your driver preparation and confidence is your car setup satisfaction. This will get you closer to 100% driver preparation during practice and improve your driver confidence.

How to create the perfect F1 Manager 23 setup

So now that I’ve looked at how car setups work in F1 Manager 23 and why they are important, I want to run through my exact process for achieving 100% setup satisfaction.

The first thing to do is jump right into the first practice session. We’ll utilise all three practice sessions to get 100% setup satisfaction. If you simulate or skip these sessions, the setup satisfaction will improve, but you likely won’t get close to 100% satisfaction. So I’d recommend playing through each practice session for maximum gains.

Step 1 – Make initial adjustments

At the beginning of the first practice session, the blue bars will be pretty large. All you need to do for your first practice run is ensure that the white bars are in the blue range, roughly in the middle.

Step 2 – First practice run

Once you’ve made any adjustments to the car setup to ensure the white bars are within the blue range, head over to the tyre compound window and choose some hard tyres. Then change the run plan to around 20 laps.

I always recommend a first run of at least 20 laps as the longer your runs, the faster the track acclimatisation will increase. Also, it is essential to give the driver enough time on track to give all 5 setup feedback. If they only get to 3 or 4 out of 5, the setup feedback won’t be complete, and it’ll slow down the whole process.

Generally, your driver will complete their setup testing and feedback on the car setup after around 15 or so laps. But try to keep them out on track until you’ve hit the 20 lap number.

You can track the driver setup feedback by keeping an eye on the comments icon in the practice goals screen. It will start by reading 0/5 and slowly increase throughout the practice run.

Once it hits 5/5, you’re driver will pop up with a setup feedback screen, and this icon will turn blue. Once you’ve got all 5 setup goals and run for around 20 laps, bring your driver into the pits to tweak your car setup.

Step 3 – Make some adjustments

Once your driver gets back into the pits, hit the reconfigure button which will take you to the car setup screen. You will see the blue bars in the setup satisfaction screen will reduce, and you’ll get feedback on each part of the car’s bias.

The feedback for each area will be either positive or negative depending on how close you got the white bar to the perfect setup. As I mentioned earlier, getting each area to optimal is the goal for getting 100% setup satisfaction.

What you’ll want to do now is tweak the car setup a little to move the white bars. If any of the bars have slipped out of the blue range, you will want to adjust the car setup so all 5 white bars are back within the blue range.

If the white bars are within the blue range, you will want to adjust the car setup so that the white bars are just slightly different to the previous setup. This will help us find which direction to adjust our car setup for future runs.

You will notice that when you move the setup, there will be two blue markers that indicate the best setup so far. You can also see white markers that sit just above and below the bar.

I’ll touch on these a little more after our second practice run as it’ll become more clear on how these work. But essentially, the blue markers indicate the best car setup so far, and the white markers indicate the previous car setup.

Step 4 – Second practice run

For now though, you want to make your adjustments and then choose your tyres and run plan once again.

If you still have life left in your hard tyres, you may be able to use the same set of tyres again for your second run. If the tyres are looking too worn, choose a new set of tyres.

Then change the run plan to 20 laps again and send your driver back out on track. This time, we won’t keep the driver out for the full 20 laps. Instead, as soon as they provide all 5 setup feedback which is indicated by the number next to the comments icon.

Once you get all 5 comments and the icon turns blue, you can safely call your driver back into the pits.

Step 5 – Narrowing down our setup further

Once your drivers come back into the pits after their second run, you’ll once again see the blue bars shrink. Some of the white bars may once again be out of the blue bars, so we’ll need to move them back into the blue bar.

Now we have two runs under our belt, we can really start to explore the car setup using the previous and best markers that I mentioned earlier. These are both very important and give us a good indication on which direction to next move our car setup in.

The white markers show our most recent setup guess, while the blue markers indicate the most accurate guess. We can use these two markers to narrow down where the perfect setup is.

If the best marker is to the left of our previous guess, we know to move the setup in that direction and we can rule out the right-hand side completely. In this scenario, we’ll want to adjust our car setup so the white bar is to the left of our previous guess.

Fixing bad feedback

If we have bad feedback and the white bar is out of the blue range, we will want to adjust the car setup pretty drastically. In this case, we can try to move the white bar pretty aggressively towards the other side of the blue bar.

We can do this as we know our previous setup attempt wasn’t close to the optimal setup. This will help quickly narrow down which direction the setup should be during our third practice run.

Refining great feedback

If on the other hand, the feedback comes back as good or great, we know that the optimal setup isn’t too far away from our previous attempt. This means we don’t need to move the white bar too much to find the optimal range.

Good feedback means you’re pretty close. Great feedback means you are very close and very minor adjustments are required.

Step 6 – Third practice run

Once you have adjusted the setup bars once more and you’re happy with where they are, you can send your drivers back out on track for another 20 lap stint. Again, make sure to call them in as soon as you get 5/5 setup comments.

Before sending them out, ensure you have made adjustments to each area of the car setup. Remember, minor adjustments for great feedback, and more drastic adjustments for negative feedback. Always making sure the white bars are within the blue range.

How car setup changes affect your setup?

At this stage, while really refining your car setup, it is important to know which setup changes affect certain parts of your setup satisfaction. It can be frustrating trying to get all white bars in the blue range as each setup change adjusts the car setup in multiple areas.

You may have the optimal braking stability, for example, only to have to adjust certain parts of the setup which also move the braking stability bar. If this does happen, you may then need to adjust another part of your car setup to get the braking stability bar back to the optimal range.

Below are all of the setup tweaks and what they affect;

• Front Wing Angle – Affects Oversteer, Braking Stability, Cornering, Traction, Straights
• Rear Wing Angle – Affects Oversteer, Braking Stability, Cornering, Traction, Straights
• Anti-Roll Distribution – Affects Oversteer, Braking Stability, Cornering, Traction
• Tyre Camber – Affects Oversteer, Braking Stability, Cornering, Traction
• Toe-Out – Affects Braking Stability, Cornering

How I generally go about adjusting the car setup is to start with the front and rear wings. These options affect every part of the car setup, but they are the only two options that change the straights part of the setup.

You can adjust both the front and rear wings to get the straights satisfaction in the spot that you need it. And then move on to the rest of the car setup knowing that your straights setup won’t change.

Also, you’ll notice that the rear wing angle has a much larger impact on your setup and changes the bar positioning much more than the front wing. You can use this to make large sweeping changes to your entire setup.

The toe-out affects the least amount of setup options, so generally I leave this to last. It only changes the braking stability and cornering, so you can use it to make fine adjustments to these two areas.

Step 7 – Rinse and repeat

After completing three practice runs, you’ll have a much smaller window for the setup as the blue bars will be much smaller. At this stage, you should have a generally good setup. But don’t panic if you don’t.

There are three practice sessions, so you can use all of them to really fine-tune the setup. And in some cases, it can take all three practice sessions and multiple runs to find the perfect car setup.

After your third practice run, you will most likely be making smaller setup tweaks to fine-tune the car setup. Remember to look at the blue and white markers that indicate the best and previous setup attempts.

You will have a pretty good idea by using these bars in which direction the optimal setup is. If for example your previous attempt was to the left of the best marker, and you only got good or even negative feedback. You’ll know that you can move the setup over to the right-hand side of the best marker.

Also, try to remember the feedback you received on previous runs. If the feedback changes from great down to good or bad, you know you have gone in the wrong direction with the setup. You can then re-adjust the setup back towards the best marker, or over to the other side of it.

Once you have multiple parts of the car setup satisfaction in the optimal range, you will only want to make very minor setup adjustments. You should focus on making adjustments to the part of the car setup that isn’t optimal. But you won’t want to move the areas that are optimal.

Try to focus on the setup changes that affect things in smaller increments. These are your front wing, toe out and tyre camber. Generally, you won’t want to adjust your rear wing as that makes very drastic changes to your overall setup.

This may require you to adjust a few areas of the car setup to ensure you move the bar you need to while keeping the optimal bars exactly where they need to be.

Conclusion

After continual tweaking if required, you should be able to get the white bars to their optimal range for both drivers across the three practice sessions. Sometimes, you may luck into a great setup early on, while other times you’ll be made to work a bit harder for it.

But following the tips above, especially keeping an eye on the previous and best markers, will always get you closer to the optimal car setup in F1 Manager 23. And this will reward your driver with the highest amount of confidence for the rest of the weekend.

If you do get 100% car setup satisfaction before practice 3, I would still recommend running through the rest of the practice sessions. This will increase your track acclimatisation and car parts knowledge, which will also increase your driver’s confidence come the race.