There is one big mistake a lot of F1 players make every year. While they work on car setups and strategies over and over, many people have never tried to adjust their controller to get the maximum out of their peripherals.
This guide is here to change that. We will show you how to get an important advantage over your opponents by adjusting key settings for your gamepad in F1 22.
Calibration is the Foundation
While it is common that players with a wheel and pedals need to do a lot of calibration work before hitting the track, this is also very crucial for gamepad users. Especially old and worn-out hardware often needs a bit of calibration to keep up with new peripherals.
Head to the control settings and click on calibration. First, hover over steering deadzone. The more deadzone you add, the later the game will start to notice your input. This can can counter a slightly imbalanced neutral position of your joystick, which typically results in your car leaning to the left or right on straights.
Activate the button test and flick your steering joystick to the left and right and back to its neutral position. If the test tool now shows a value of zero, your joystick is good to go. If the tool displays a value other than zero, you have to add a respective amount of steering deadzone.
Adjust the Saturation to Leave Nothing Unused
Next setting is the steering saturation, which can amplify your inputs. Because you use a gamepad instead of a wheel, you want to make sure to be able to use the full steering range of your car. Activate the test tool again and flick your joystick to the left and right as far as possible. If you do not reach a value of 100, you have to add saturation until 100 is reached.
Linearity Gives you More Control Over the Car
The last setting is steering linearity. More linearity means your inputs will be translated to the game stronger the more you push the joystick towards the outside. This also results in less sensitivity for inputs around the neutral position.
All of this can help you to have more precise control in wide angle corners and at the same time easier turn ins for the sharper corners. This setting relies a lot on your feeling in the game and can thus not be adjusted just by using the test tool. We recommend a value between zero and 25, but you have to find out yourself.
Adjust the Brake and Throttle Accordingly
Throttle and brake deadzone should be calibrated similarly to the steering joystick. The same goes for saturation. We recommend using a brake and throttle linearity value of around 50. This allows you give more nuanced inputs, providing you with more control and stability in and out of corners.
Change Differential and Brake Bias with your Joystick
Now that we calibrated the gamepad, it is time to hop in the car. If you ever watched F1 drivers onboard, you’ve probably noticed they adjust the differential and brake balance of their cars ahead of almost every corner. This is because these adjustments will help you get around a circuit much easier and faster. With the standard gamepad control scheme, adjusting these settings can be quite messy.
We advise you to unbind your right joystick that is by default used to look around while driving. But since the game provides you side mirrors and even a virtual rear mirror, we can allow us to rebind this joystick.
Go to the control settings and scroll down to “MFD shortcuts”. Here, we bind increase and decrease for both brake bias and differential to the four different positions of the joystick. Now those important settings are quickly and easily accessible for you.
Optional: Set the ERS Button to Hold
A second quality of life setting concerns the ERS. By default, it is activated or deactivated with one click on your preferred button. But it happened to all of us that we left the ERS on or clicked the button by accident while setting up something else.
A good helper in this situation is to set the ERS mode from toggle to hold. You can find this setting by entering control settings and then generic controls. This switch will allow you to only use the ERS when you really want to.
This setting relies heavily on your personal preference. But we found it was definitely worth mentioning.
What is your best advice for controller settings in F1 22? Tell us by sending a tweet @OverTake_gg or leave a comment down below!
