How have F1 25’s developers approached replicating Red Bull’s weird second driver black hole? Well, it’s a bit complicated

We’re only four races into real world F1’s 2025 season as I type this, and the Red Bull team has already essentially fired (well, demoted) one of its drivers, drafting in a replacement after just two races. There were no factors outside of on-track performance that played into it as far as we know, just two cars on track that looked to be in totally different classes.

The curse of being Max Verstappen’s team mate had already claimed its latest victim – in the form of Liam Lawson making way for the previously overlooked Yuki Tsunoda – prior to me even getting to preview this year’s F1 game. So, I had to ask F1 25’s devs how they’ve gone about replicating just how different two cars in the same team can perform and be like to drive.

“I think the approach we take with the drivers in particular is that we build them based on what we perceive of their performance in the real world,” senior creative director Lee Mather told me, “So we’ll try and build them based on the strengths that we see them have in the sport.”

“For example,” he explained, “we use confidence under braking, confidence on the throttle, confidence in close proximity to another car. So, if they’ve got really good confidence with close proximity, they’re more likely to make an overtake or make a risky overtake because they’re more comfortable doing so. We have confidence in the wet as well. So, for someone who’s maybe not performing at their best, that confidence is built into it.

“I think, in that case, you would see in our game that you can have two drivers both driving exactly the same car, but maybe one of them’s got less confidence under braking, and you would see that they’re not as effective as the other driver. So, while we don’t maybe build it to the degree – the extremes – that we’ve seen recently in the sport, where I think it’s maybe not the best representation of their performance because of the time they’ve had in the car, we do build in those driver traits.

“So, you would find one driver is better at certain characteristics than others. Then you’ve got some drivers where obviously – Max and Lewis, for example – they’re strong in pretty much all areas.”

I asked Mather if, as well as influencing the AI drivers, the difficulty to extract performance from a car as tricky as the Red Bull is something the player will be able to feel when they hop behind the wheel themselves.

“I think the difference for us is we build the cars to try and be as approachable as possible and balanced,” he responded, “I was at the F1 sim racing recently, and they are very much in the Max [Verstappen] school of driving [in] that they build a setup that gives them the most insane lap time, but I couldn’t drive one of their cars. I think that’s probably a good comparison to sometimes what we see in the sport where some certain extremes are not easy for others to drive, and that’s definitely the case in [the sim racing world].”

For more on F1 25, make sure to check out the multi-part preview of it we’ve had going up over the course of this month – here’s the first one on the big overhaul to the MyTeam mode.