Formula One Championship Edition

Apparently, Formula One Championship Edition is the closest you’ll get to the real thing without being speared through the guts by the nose of a 200mph Ferrari. Formula One, you see, has been dying at an inversely proportional rate to the success of one Michael Schumacher - the more he won, the more people got bored and stopped watching.

So in order to make Championship Edition more exciting than watching the Antiques Roadshow on valium, you’ll want to head straight over to the options section and switch off every last one of the driving aids. Right from the start, no messing around. Alright, maybe you could leave the virtual racing line on to get a feel for the circuits and their respective braking points, although the game looks sharp enough that you can easily see tire marks tracing the racing line. Assisted steering, traction control, anti-spin, anti-lock braking - it all needs to go.

Once all that stuff has been ditched, you can embark on a tricky, grueling, World Championship season with almost as much head-spinning attention to detail as the real thing. Every race weekend goes through a number of stages: Friday’s free practice, Saturday’s free practice, three 15-minute qualifying sessions on Saturday afternoon and finally the race itself. While the first couple of race sessions can be ignored (they are useful for memorizing those all important braking points, though), the qualifiers are essential, otherwise you’ll be stuck at the back of the grid and more than likely to lose bits of your car as you attempt to slice through the field.

Then comes the Grand Prix itself. There’s plenty of big race atmosphere, just like on TV. As cars wait to explode off the starting grid - sometimes literally - a heat haze makes the screen go funny and a cacophony of whining engines reaches fever pitch. And when the lights go out, the race for the first corner is hair raising.