Apparent confirmation that a 2023 F1 car would be added to last year’s game, F1 22, was written in, and then removed from, an official Formula 1 article.
Image credit: RaceDepartment
UPDATE 22/02/2023: The C43 was added to F1 22 today. The vehicle is driveable in Time Trial mode only, and it will be the only 2023 car to be featured in F1 22.
Alessandro Alunni Bravi, the Managing Director of the Sauber Group and Alfa Romeo F1 Team Stake Representative alluded to further collaborations between Alfa Romeo and EA Sports. Bravi stated that the company is “proud to be at the leading edge of this pioneering approach, but this is not the whole story: we have a lot more in store, planned for the season, and we can’t wait to show you.”
ORIGINAL ARTICLE 09/02/2023:
The 2023 Formula One season is getting underway soon, with the cars being launched and pre-season testing beginning this month. A couple of teams have already officially launched their cars, and one of them is Alfa Romeo.
Their new C43 features some livery tweaks. They have swapped out the white that has been on their cars since 2018 for black, perhaps to acclimatise their fans who will see the Sauber team swap out the Alfa Romeo branding for the darker tones of Audi in 2026.
The upcoming Audi partnership with Sauber was actually marked with a limited-time Audi livery available for the player car in the Podium Pass on F1 22. That was arguably the closest we have been to a future F1 car in a present day F1 game. However, that was merely the livery on the car used in My Team and in ranked multiplayer races.
But now it would appear that a fully fledged F1 car from the ‘future’ is now coming to F1 22.
In the official article on Formula1.com discussing the launch, there may have been a mistake left in there. It has since been removed from the article, but not before a Reddit user was able to take a screenshot of the text. The article originally stated that the C43 will be added to F1 22 on the eve of the Bahrain test, which begins 23 February.
This would be a first. Traditionally, no F1 game has ever added in an F1 car from the season succeeding the one it’s based upon. There have been plenty of cars from previous seasons in many games, but never ones from the future.
Admittedly, the article does refer to the game as ‘F1 2022’, which is incorrect since F1 22 was the first instalment in Codemasters’ tenure developing the games to drop the four number year denotation. While that may be a knock on the information’s credibility, it did come from F1 themselves. That suggests that there ought to be some truth in this.
Past Examples
While no future season’s F1 cars have been added before, the F1 games have been unafraid in the past to add in new liveries to use on the player cars. Back on F1 2021 after a limited time where they swapped out the traditional Red Bull livery for the all-white Japan-themed livery that they used in that year’s Turkish Grand Prix, they added it in to use on the player car.
Also, in the same Podium Pass that featured the Audi livery was the Racing Future Mode livery that McLaren raced in last year’s Singapore and Japanese Grand Prix. So that could lend some credence to the idea of either temporarily putting the 2023 Alfa Romeo livery on the 2022 car, or adding the 2023 livery as a podium pass item.
But, in the slight chance that it really is Alfa Romeo’s 2023 car coming to the 2022 game, this is certainly unprecedented.
Do you think the 2023 Alfa Romeo F1 is coming to F1 22? Tell us on Twitter at @OverTake_gg or in the comments down below!
