I’ll just say right now that having watched the first few races of the real life F1 2026 seasons, I’m NOT holding out much hope for the F1 26 game, due out as a DLC patch for F1 25 later this year. The handling and physics will presumably be a stylized version of that of the real life F1 2026 cars, which will mean a LOT of battery management and restricted speed in corners and towards the end of straights. It might well be an underwhelming experience, as it has been in real life for many fans.

Maybe I’ll be proven wrong and EA/Codies will put a spin on the F1 26 handling and rules that makes the game fun to play. But I think it’s at least 50/50 odds that the game will be about as disappointing as the real life F1 for many players.

With that in mind, I wanted to already plan ahead for this and think about possibly reverting back to some older F1 games for league racing if the experience on F1 26 does turn out to be disappointing to the point that people don’t really want to race online on it.

It’d be a great chance to go back to some of the more popular older F1 games. And even if the F1 26 is still fun to play, why not set up more retro leagues anyway – especially on older games like F1 2020 which have classic cars. Many players will still have the older games and you can get second hand disc copies of them anyway pretty easily in most countries (digital copies get take down off the online stores now after about 2 years, but disc copies can still be installed and played).

So I’ve put a poll down below to test interest in this – would you be interested in playing in online leagues on any of these older F1 games? You can check any that would interest you.

 

F1 23 Retro League Idea

F1 23 was pretty highly rated among players, much better than what came the year before or the year after. It had a good handling and ERS system and the online racing was good from what I could remember, probably similar or a little better than F1 25. Plus you’d still have the Portugal and France tracks to use, which have been removed from the current games.

 F1 2020 Retro League (2020 Cars)

I remember the cars on F1 2020 having monstrous grip and downforce, with some seriously pointy handling and quick lap times. You also had the Vietnam track that was never actually used, Plus the now dumped France and Sochi tracks as well as the old layouts for Spain, Melbourne, Singapore and Abu Dhabi.

F1 2020 Retro League (Using 2010 Red Bull)

This is the one I’d most want to try. I always remember using this classic car with it’s planted, grippy feel and insane levels of downforce, plus the old V8 engine noise. I’d love to race in an equal performance league where everyone just uses this car for a level playing field. Would get rid of this Pirelli tyre management stuff and just revert back to how it was in 2010 – pushing flat out on low deg tyres (from memory, the classic car lobbies on these games did give you a Bridgestone style durable but grippy tyre).

Would do 50% races, 1 stop mandated in dry conditions, do whatever you want in the wet. The 2010 Ferrari and the 2010 McLaren are also available on this game as classic cars, so perhaps could even do a mixed league if the cars have basically equal performance or could be equalled out in settings (would need testing out).

F1 2020 Classic League (Use 2009 Brawn)

Another grippy, high downforce classic car I think it’s be fun to league race with is the 2009 Brawn that Button won his title with. Again it’s a standard classic car on the F1 2020 game so totally doable if the servers are still open. Same ideas as the RB idea above – everyone uses the Brawn, flat out 50% races, 1 stop mandated. Grippy and durable generic tyres as supplied by the game when using classic cars. No battery management BS.

F1 2018 (Using 2018 Cars)

F1 2018 was another really interesting and fun game to race online with, better than anything we’ve had recently in my opinion. This was the year with the massive selection of tyres – I think it was 7 different compounds of dry tyres including the bubblegum colored Hypersoft tyre that was basically a qualifying tyre. The general qualifying and tyre rules were also different back then. ERS was also fully managed – there wasn’t the simple “Overtake” button that came in in 2020 yet, you switched between all battery modes. But you could still push and there wasn’t any “superclipping” or other nonsense we’re likely to get on F1 26.