What’s changed in F1 25 – and why? In-depth Q&A with Codemasters’ Gavin Cooper

The new instalment of the official Formula 1 game will arrive next week.

RaceFans quizzed Codemasters’ creative director Gavin Cooper on what’s new for 2025 including the updated My Team mode, reverse tracks, the third episode in the Braking Point series – and the addition of characters from F1: The Movie.

RF: What are the main changes that should attract fans and players to go out and get F1 25 over F1 24?

Cooper: The really big one, we have My Team 2.0. That’s something that fans have been clamouring for for a long, long time, since we introduced it in 2020. It’s chock-full of new features. I think it’s probably the deepest career mode we’ve done to date. So I think that’s one big area.

We’ve got the return of Braking Point, the third chapter, that’s obviously something that only happens in the odd years, so that’s another reason to come back. For players who have invested time in the characters and the team, I think it’s a good reason to see what’s happening with them. But at the same time, every year we do Braking Point we try and make sure that it’s not reliant on you having played the previous situation, so I’m hoping the same is true.

RF: Is this the final part of a three-act structure for Braking Point? Are we going to be left on a cliffhanger or are we going to have the end of the mode and feel like we’ve completed a full journey?

Cooper: I won’t give away too much. I’d say it definitely doesn’t end on a cliffhanger, but then I wouldn’t say that any of our previous chapters have either, really. They’re all designed to be self-contained stories that you can appreciate from start to finish.

In terms of what it leaves us open to do in the future, we’ll really take a view on that based on how well is Braking Point chapter three received, but then also, fundamentally, every time we come to the next project, we really look at what interesting stories can we tell. Both from a narrative point of view but also how we tell those stories in terms of the structure of the mode, what changes can we make?

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RF: Narrative focus modes in a game like this is still quite novel, especially in the racing game sphere, but now you’ve got the inclusion of the F1 movie side of it as well. How has that been to balance your own narrative and the story that you want to tell while also at the same time incorporating a mode that’s retelling a story that a lot of fans are going to be watching in the F1 film?

Cooper: I don’t think it’s been too bad. These are different fictional universes, they don’t cross over. We’re not trying to pretend that either of these are the real sport, they’re each their own sort of story. So there’s not been a lot of conflicts in that sense and they’re both kind of compelling narratives in their own right.

I think with such a big portion of the audience coming to the sport over the last few years and coming through things like Drive to Survive that are putting their own narrative spin on what’s going on in the real sports I think there’s space for different stories to exist within that.

RF: My Team was introduced back in 2020, it’s something that a lot of fans have been kind of wanting to see. We had the big changes to the drivers-focussed Career Mode last year, now we’ve got My Team 2. You have already talked about and put material about what has changed. What do you think is going to be the most exciting thing that you are looking forward to players getting their hands on with the new My Team mode?

Cooper: It’s hard to pick one thing out because ultimately My Team isn’t really based around one cool thing. It’s the tapestry, it’s the way all the different features interlock and how they affect one another that makes it an interesting space.

I’m really happy with how the new facility improvement system has come out. I think the facility upgrades that we had previously were quite dry, quite simple. They replicated the same kind of structure for each of the R&D departments. I think we’ve got a lot more interesting decision-making into that area of the game, and that does reach out and sort of tap into pretty much everything else that’s in My Team.

Depending on where you focus your facility improvements between engineering, personnel and corporate, you’re looking really to invest in that massive range of features I was just talking about. Do you want to focus more on your ability to sign deals with drivers that might otherwise be a little bit out of reach? Or do you want to focus more on making money and maybe attack the problem that way and just pay them more money because you’re a richer team? How do you balance both of those things against the need to keep pumping out car upgrades to stay competitive? That all links to the changes we’ve made to separate development out from research.

So I see that as being one of the core areas of the game that kind of helps define all the different ways that we’ve managed to change the experience this year.

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RF: Are you still going to be able to choose the starting qualities of your team such as being a back marker or a midfield team or a championship team?

Cooper: When you start your My Team career, there’s a certain number of background questions to introduce yourself to the team and through that, yes, you can choose your level of starting investment in terms of car upgrades. You can also choose your starting level of investment in your facility, so if you want to start with a whole bunch of facility improvements right off the bat, you can do.

You can also choose how much starting cash you have. But that also applies a cash modifier so if you don’t want to be in constant fear of living on the ragged edge and never having any money, if you just want to make things a bit more generous for yourself, then you can do that as well.

RF: Some people have voiced disappointment that you can no longer be an owner-driver, I know that you’ve said that you tried to move away from the fantasy of that arrangement, but could you just explain a little bit more about the thinking behind taking the personal player avatar out of My Team and having it where you pick the two drivers and you’re controlling them rather than your own character?

Cooper: As you say, fundamentally it’s not authentic for you to play as simultaneously the owner of the team and the lead driver of that team. Yes, there is some precedent within the sport but it’s not authentic [in 2025]. So that was one reason to take it away.

But really that wasn’t the main reason. The main reason is when we were thinking about how can we improve My Team and give the player more interesting choices to make, there was a whole scene of interesting choices that we couldn’t really mine when it was predicated on the player being asked to choose between two drivers.

Within the sport, whether you’re watching Drivers to Survive or just following the real sport, everyone knows how much spicy fun there is in a team trying to manage two drivers that have competing concerns. And that’s not something we really modelled because anytime we put a choice in front of you and said which of your drivers do you want to prioritise, you’d say give me the good stuff. It’s not an interesting choice at that point.

So that’s what taking the custom character out allowed us to do. It allowed us to put some of those choices in, in conjunction with the R&D changes I was talking about earlier. If your development has failed, for example, and you’ve only got one copy of the part, who do you give it to? That’s now an interesting decision because you’re not directly manifesting yourself as one of those drivers.

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It becomes more rooted in how is that choice going to affect how that driver thinks about me? How is it going to impact on contract negotiations when it comes around to potentially trying to re-sign that driver? Which driver is going to be able to make the best use out of it in terms of delivering points for the team? These are all choices that we can now expose to the player where we couldn’t before and that’s really kind of what’s driven that.

RF: You’ve added a lot of LiDAR updates that you’ve done last year. Are Codemasters going to be visiting more circuits this year to gather data for potentially future titles? Now you’ve started the process of collecting that detailed data, is that kind of a mission statement for the series?

Cooper: Went through the process of getting the LiDAR data over the course of the 24 seasons. So in terms of the LiDAR updates that we delivered for F1 25, for that we prioritised the tracks that came earlier in the calendar because we needed the data a certain amount of time before the game comes out so we have time to actually process that, build the tracks, make the updates. So that’s why this time around it’s the early tracks.

But we continued getting all the rest of the ’24 data. So we now have the whole calendar’s worth of data. So in future titles when we look to make further LiDAR updates, at that point we can be a bit more picky about which ones we go after and obviously more factor into that is, you which tracks need those updates.

We’ve got a prioritised list that we can continue to think about. But where we go with tracks more generally in the future, really we’ve got is a lot of options.

We’ve got the LiDAR updates, we’re obviously putting in reverse tracks this year. That was one of the things [where] we’re doing the as-authentic-as-possible end of the spectrum, let’s do something at the fantasy end of spectrum, something you can’t even see in the real sport, but is fun.

Obviously we’ve also got Madrid coming next year. We have no idea what else the real sport could be throwing at us in the short-to-medium future.

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We know fans would really like to see historic tracks as well, and that’s not something we’re ignoring, but some stuff would have to line up for that to be possible. But that’s something that we continue to consider in the background as well.

So we’ve got loads of options in terms of where we go with tracks, so really it’s a balancing question. We have a certain amount of resource that we can spend on these tracks so where’s the best place to put that? And really that’s going to be largely informed by how people react to these.

RF: We’ve had a few driver changes this year, what is the driver line-up going to be when we get the game?

Cooper: The Tsunoda-Lawson swap, that’s going to be respected, that’ll be there at launch. Except on Braking Points because they’re more tied in to the narrative. It’s harder to change that, basically. But for the rest of the game, yes, that will be respected.

On the Doohan-Colapinto swap, Colapinto’s only contracted at the moment for five races I think, so we’re going to wait and see what happens. So players will have Doohan at launch, respecting the start of the season, and we’ll take a view on what happens over the next few weeks.

RF: Give us your last pitch: Why this is going to be something that’s really going to worth F1 fans investing their time and money in and going for when it comes out?

Cooper: It’s so hard to boil it [down], because the trouble is the game is broad and I think that kind of speaks to the fact that the audience is broad these days, the audience for F1 is really diverse and comes from a lot of different places. So I think that’s probably my answer.

If there’s one thing to take away from it, although I appreciate again, probably just sound like a cop out, really the main thing is, is it doesn’t really matter what kind of fan of F1 you are, there ought to be something here for you. If you’re the kind of person who likes turning all the assists off and has a big sweaty rig, brilliant, there’s so much there for you. The handling’s seen some really good improvements this year. Obviously the LiDAR updates make those on-track experiences more than they’ve ever been.

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At the same time, if you’re coming through Drive to Survive and you just like the sport because it’s dramatic and spicy, you’ve got the F1 Movie content, you’ve got Braking Point, we’ve deliberately built the game to support that level of skill as well.

And I think that’s really the thing, we want to make sure that it’s a celebration of F1, and one that doesn’t gatekeep F1 and say ‘you’re the wrong kind of fan’ or ‘you’re not good enough to enjoy this’. Everyone should be able to enjoy it, and I think we’ve done more to address that this year than any year previously.

Look out for RaceFans’ detailed review of F1 25 next week

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