Formula 1 All The Races

What You Need to Know Before Starting

Formula 1 All The Races is a browser-based historical F1 simulator that lets you recreate any Grand Prix from 1950 onward and play through it as driver, team principal, or just someone who wants to relive the '89 Senna versus Prost battle at Suzuka. It's not a proper racing game with physics and controllers. You make strategic calls, pick your setup parameters, and the game simulates the rest using historical telemetry and race results as the baseline. What makes it interesting is the freedom to diverge from what actually happened and see what might have. I spent a solid weekend last autumn trying to get a sensible Qualifying setup for a 1997 German Grand Prix replay. By German Grand Prix I mean the one at Hockenheim where Schumacher got the DRS flap banned mid-session. The game doesn't model technical regulation changes during a weekend unless you load the right data patch, so my car had full DRS by lap 18 and the sim was basically broken. The workaround was pulling the official 1997 race notes from the FOM media pack, finding the moment the ban took effect, and manually adjusting the DRS threshold parameter in the settings menu. Once I did that, the tire degradation curves matched reality again. I don't remember the exact menu path but it's under Race Setup then Aerodynamics then DRS Enablement. Took me about forty five minutes to find it.

Getting Formula 1 All The Races Setup

You can grab it directly from the developer's site at f1alltheraces.com. There's no installer to speak of — it's a single HTML file you open in Chrome or Firefox. No account required for basic mode. The premium tier costs about twelve dollars a month and unlocks the full driver database going back to 1950, all constructor livery packs, and the multi-car team management mode where you control both cars simultaneously. Without premium you get 2010 onward and a limited pool of drivers. If you're serious about older eras, the subscription is worth it. Otherwise you're working with a truncated dataset that skips a lot of the interesting seasons. Installation is just downloading the zip and extracting it to a folder. No registration key, no anti-cheat, nothing that contacts your machine beyond loading the WebGL canvas. I ran it on a laptop with integrated graphics at 1080p without any frame rate issues. The simulation runs client-side, so your hardware matters more for rendering than for calculation. The math is simple enough that even a five-year-old tablet handles it fine.

How the Simulation Actually Works

The core engine uses a simplified race model based on historical performance deltas. Each driver has a pace profile — qualifying pace, race pace, tire wear rate, fuel consumption — pulled from the actual event you've selected. When you make a call, like pitting two laps earlier than the optimal strategy, the game recalculates everything from that point forward using those baseline numbers plus randomization weighted toward real outcomes. It does not generate a completely fictional result. That's an important distinction. You can create a plausible alternate scenario, but the game won't let you win a race you had no statistical chance of winning. The pace numbers are fixed to reality. One thing most beginners miss is that the tire model uses a compound-specific degradation curve, not just a generic wear number. So choosing between soft and medium at Monza in 2005 is a much bigger deal than at Silverstone in the same year, because the degradation spread between compounds is wider at Monza. I learned this the hard way during a 2005 Canadian Grand Prix run where I pitted both cars for hards on lap 12 and both blew out by lap 30. The game flagged it as an unrealistic compound choice, which was accurate since the hards were simply not viable on that surface that year. Switching to the intermediates for the wet patch on lap 22 was the right call, and the game handled that correctly with the wet tire model. The pit stop simulation is where the game gets genuinely good. Stop duration factors in crew performance, tire gun issues, and mechanical problems specific to the constructor. If you pick Ferrari in 2014, you're looking at slower stops than Mercedes because the game pulls the actual average stop times for each team that season. I ran a test where I set both cars to the same optimal strategy at Spa 2014 and the Mercedes pits were consistently two tenths faster per stop. That difference added up to eight or nine seconds over a full race. It's a small detail but it changes how you approach strategy calls.

Building a Race Strategy from Scratch

Start by checking the weather forecast for the session. The game generates a realistic weather window based on the actual conditions from that race weekend. If rain is likely in the second half, early tire choices matter. I've found it more efficient to plan the undercuts first and let the overcuts happen organically rather than trying to force them. The undercut works because the game models fresh tire lap performance accurately. A set of softs on lap 15 will be genuinely faster than worn hards on lap 30, and the tire warmup period gives you a window to gain positions before the opponent's tires come into play. Setup work happens before the race and it's where most people waste time. The aerodynamic balance matters more than raw downforce for race pace, not qualifying. A car that's too sensitive on corner entry will lose time over a long stint even if the top speed is better. I usually start with a neutral balance and adjust only if the first practice simulation shows clear understeer or oversteer patterns. Spending more than ten minutes on setup tweaks for a single race rarely moves the needle more than half a second per lap. That's not worth the effort unless you're running a championship simulation across multiple races where consistency compounds. DNS and retirement handling is another area that trips people up. When a driver retires, the game doesn't just remove them from the standings. It recalculates the safety car windows, the pit lane opening times, and the tire strategies for everyone else because the track position has shifted. I ran into this during a 2011 Malaysian Grand Prix replay when Hamilton retired on lap 8. The safety car window shifted by four laps and my undercut strategy that I'd built around pit lane exit position became completely wrong. I had to rebuild the strategy from lap 9 onward, which took about three minutes. It's something to be aware of if you're playing through longer sessions.

Common Mistakes That Waste Your Time

The biggest one is treating the practice sessions as meaningful. They are. The game gives you practice data but it has high variance. A fast practice lap doesn't correlate well with race pace, especially in the 2010s when teams ran low-fuel spec setups in practice and race trim in qualifying. I used to spend twenty minutes analyzing practice timing sheets and then wonder why my race strategy was off by thirty seconds. The fix is to use practice data only as a rough indicator and trust the official quali and race results more. The game has both available in the data panel and they're usually more consistent with each other. Another mistake is overloading the strategy with too many variables. You don't need to adjust tire pressures, suspension geometry, and engine modes simultaneously. The game weights these differently and some parameters have no effect at all in certain seasons. DRS depth changes in 2011 had virtually no impact on race outcome compared to tire strategy. I learned this after spending an hour tweaking DRS parameters in a 2011 Singapore replay only to realize the variable was essentially decorative for that race. The real lever was tire choice and pit timing. Stick to the parameters that actually move the needle. There's also the issue of historical accuracy versus fun. The game tries to stay true to what happened, but it will let you diverge. Sometimes that divergence produces a result that feels wrong even though it's mathematically plausible. I had a 1994 Australian Grand Prix run where my driver won by six seconds because I chose a different tire strategy and the rain held off longer than in reality. The game allowed it, but it felt hollow because the historical context mattered. This isn't a flaw in the game, it's just something to be aware of if you care about historical fidelity.

Advanced Tactics for Competitive Play

Team radio simulation is one of the more underappreciated features. You can send messages to your drivers about tire management, fuel saving, and pace adjustments. The game responds to these with realistic driver behavior changes. If you tell a driver to save fuel and they're fighting for position, they'll slow down but the gap to the car ahead will increase faster than if they were at full pace. This is useful in close races where a few tenths matter. I've used it successfully in 2016 Brazilian Grand Prix replays where fuel saving on lap 40 allowed me to stay clean on the second stint and overtake on fresher tires later. The constructor points calculation is another area where people get surprised. The game awards points based on finishing position, not hypothetical best case. So if your teammate retires on lap 5, you don't get bonus points for a hypothetical second place. You get the points for your actual finish. This matters in championship simulations where every point counts. I ran a 2008 championship simulation and kept getting frustrated because my constructor total was lower than expected. The issue was that my second car was retiring frequently and I wasn't accounting for the lost points in the standings. Livery customization is available but limited. You can change the primary color, add sponsor decals, and adjust the number plate style. The decals are pulled from historical sponsors for each season, so you can't add a fake sponsor that didn't exist. This is actually a good thing because it keeps the game authentic. If you want to experiment with custom liveries, there's a community module system where users share SVG files, but loading unofficial content can cause rendering issues in older browsers. I recommend sticking to the built-in options unless you're comfortable troubleshooting browser compatibility problems.

When Formula 1 All The Races Doesn't Work Well

The mobile browser experience is poor. The game was built for desktop and the touch interface is clunky. Button sizes are too small, menus require precise tapping, and the race control panel doesn't scale well to phone screens. I tried playing on my phone during a commute and gave up after twenty minutes. Use a desktop or at least a tablet with a decent screen size. The game loads faster on desktop too, partly because it renders more graphical elements. Older seasons before 1980 have incomplete data. Driver information exists but some race details are missing or estimated. If you try to simulate a 1970s race, the tire degradation models are less accurate because the data is sparser. The game does its best but you'll notice gaps in the telemetry. This is expected given the state of historical records from that era. If you're interested in classic F1, stick to post-1980 seasons for reliable results. The multi-player mode is essentially non-existent. The game supports head-to-head racing in a limited format where two players pick the same race and compare strategies, but there's no live multiplayer or ranked matchmaking. If you want to compete against other humans, you're looking at asynchronous play where you submit your strategy and the game simulates both cars. It's functional but not exciting. The game is primarily a single-player tool for exploring F1 history and strategy.

There's also no mod support beyond the community livery files I mentioned. The developers don't provide an SDK or API, so you can't create custom races, modify the simulation engine, or build your own content. For a game this focused on historical recreation, the lack of modding support is noticeable. If you're the type who likes to tweak and customize, you'll hit a wall quickly. The game is what it is, and it's a solid experience within its scope, but it won't evolve beyond the developers' roadmap.

Practical Tips That Actually Help

Save your race sessions regularly. The game autosaves every five minutes but if your browser crashes or the tab closes, you lose progress. I've lost three or four hours of championship simulation work to browser updates that cleared my session data. Use the manual save feature and name your files with the date and race so you can find them later. It takes five seconds and prevents a lot of frustration. Check the official F1 timing sheets before you start a race. The game pulls data from public sources, but sometimes the timing sheets have corrections that weren't reflected in the initial download. If your results look off, cross-reference with the official FOM timing PDF for that race. I caught an error in a 2003 Japanese Grand Prix replay where the pit stop durations were off by two tenths because the source data had a typo. Fixing it required manually adjusting the stop times in the settings menu. Don't overthink the setup. Start with the recommended setup for the circuit and driver, then make one or two adjustments max. Most of the time the default is close enough and the simulation will forgive small errors. I've seen people spend an hour on setup for a race that ends up decided by a safety car that appears on lap 12. Focus your energy on strategy calls, not setup tweaks.

If you're running a full season simulation, expect it to take about two hours per season. That's including setup, strategy calls, and reviewing the results. Some races are faster, some take longer. The 2012 Abu Dhabi Grand Prix took me forty five minutes because the strategy was complex with multiple safety car periods. A straightforward race like 2015 Austrian Grand Prix took twenty minutes. Plan accordingly if you're trying to work through a whole season in one sitting. The game doesn't have a tutorial, but the community has assembled decent walkthroughs on Reddit and the official forums. I found a thread on r/formula1 with detailed strategy guides for some of the more complex races. Reading those before you dive in will save you a lot of trial and error. The game is intuitive enough that you'll figure it out, but having a head start helps, especially for the races with unusual weather or safety car patterns.