In one of the countless ironies that make the sport so fascinating and frustrating, in what was always intended to be a stopgap year F1 in 2021 is shaping up to deliver a classic season. With F1’s radical new ruleset put back a year while teams deal with the fallout of the ongoing global crisis, the field has bunched up while the inter-team rivalry that’s been so sorely missing from the hybrid era is finally being delivered. If the Hamilton v Verstappen scrap carries on with this ferocity for the rest of the calendar, this really could go down as one of the all-time greats.
Codemasters’ F1 series has already entered its own radical new era, of course, and there’s still that little moment of shock when the EA Sports splash screen appears on boot-up, but we’re on familiar ground here. Indeed, those who worried about how EA’s $1.2 billion acquisition of Codemasters might impact its flagship series will find plenty to reassure them here, just as those looking for a significant step forward might well be disappointed: upon first impressions this very much feels like a stopgap year for the F1 series.
Heading the charge when it comes to new features is the Braking Point story mode, leaning into the lurid drama that’s been key to Netflix series’ Drive to Survive’s success – and, of course, the lifeblood of F1 itself. There’s an expanded cast brought alive with new CG that’s not quite as unnerving as Codemasters’ in-game character models (these scenes have been outsourced, with the script from the same writing team as – I can’t quite get my head around this – wizard Derren Brown). It promises to run deeper – and longer – than its ultimately inconsequential debut back in 2019. What little there was back then was genuinely entertaining, so there’s some potential for this new fully fleshed out story.
