'Like turning up to a party dressed as Batman's accountant': remembering Grand Prix Manager 2

When most people buy an F1 game, they expect to be doing the exciting bit – you know, the driving at 200mph. Occasionally though, a game appears that puts you in charge of the plate spinning management skills required behind the scenes to keep a Grand Prix team running. Yes, it does feel a bit like turning up to a fancy dress party as Batman’s accountant but, hey, it takes all sorts.

Grand Prix Manager 2 from Microprose had to sell the fantasy of being a team principal way back in the mid 1990s, decades before Netflix made that seem in any way a glamorous role. Like most management games, it’s predominately staring at a series of tarted up spreadsheets, in this case balancing the budget and the performance of a race team competing in the 1996 Formula One championship.

To be fair, the backroom dealings in GPM2 were remarkably comprehensive, perhaps unrealistically so in some cases. In addition to brokering deals with sponsors and negotiating with parts suppliers, you’d also be deciding whether to take a punt on manufacturing branded teddy bears or not. Feels a little below Toto Wolff’s pay grade, but what do we know?

Obviously those decisions came to a head at the race weekend and yet again as the ‘one man band’ team principal, you were also in charge of detailed setup decisions, such as wing angle and gear ratios. The race itself played out in a teeny, top down view on a vague approximation of the real circuit layouts.

While you had plenty of data at your fingertips, once the action began your contribution mostly extended to telling the drivers how fast to go and crossing your fingers that the ‘affordable’ engines you got for a song didn’t spontaneously detonate. Unrelated: we have serious doubts about the efficacy of crossed fingers.