When it comes to sports management simulations there’s football, and then there’s everything else. In 1982 British publisher Addictive Games released Football Manager, a text-based football management simulation that singlehandedly established a new genre of video games. Premier Manager, Championship Manager, and SEGA’s own Football Manager would all reap success following in its wake.

“ When it comes to sports management simulations there’s football, and then there’s everything else.

The isometric view of Motorsport Manager's real-time races gives them a fun, slot-car flavour.

“ “[W]hen we were growing up... everyone was playing Football Manager. But we motorsport fans felt that we were kind of missing out on a game that was similar.

How you speak to the press can impact your drivers' morale and performances.

“ The great thing with motorsport fans is they’re so vocal.

Getting the car setups right is crucial.

However, there hasn’t exactly been a glut of others over the past three decades. Microprose released a trio of F1 management sims during the late ’90s, and EA dabbled in the genre with F1 Manager just before the turn of the century. Outside of mobile and a few obscure, browser-based titles there’s little else to speak of.Enter Motorsport Manager , which began its life on mobile in 2014 and is now headed to PC with the help of SEGA. Developed by UK-based Playsport Games, Motorsport Manager on PC is aiming to emulate the game’s success on mobile and continue carving out its own niche.“A couple of years ago we made Motorsport Manager for mobile,” explains Playsport Games’ Sam White. “It was a project that was sort of developed in the bedroom.”Despite its humble origins Motorsport Manager found great success on mobile and is still currently averaging four-and-a-half to five star reviews on both the App Store and Google Play. White reveals it was a real dream to make it.“Ideally we would’ve made this game before the mobile version but when you’re a small studio and you’ve got restricted budgets it’s a bit unbelievable.”Motorsport Manager is an extremely deep game, allowing players to take the reins of a race team and juggle everything necessary to keep it running and earn success at the highest level. Hiring and fostering drivers and team members. Developing the cars. Signing and delivering on sponsorship deals. Investing in your race team’s headquarters for improved facilities. Executing on race day strategies, which include responding to driver feedback when setting up the cars for each track, calling pit stops, selecting the right tyres, and reacting to mechanical faults and weather changes.It’s an incredibly nuanced experience and, while it’s initially rather intimidating, Motorsport Manager has successfully got its tentacles around me after several sessions with an early version of the game. I’m enjoying the delicate balancing act of keeping my drivers happy (you can only develop new parts one at a time so one driver has to miss out each time you fit a newly-built part). I also like the pressure of race day and the genuinely stressful situations that can arise. For instance, your driver may be leading the race but begins complaining of a gearbox issue with just a few laps to go. Do you bring him or her in for a hasty repair and lose a few spots or do you keep the car out there, hoping it can reach the chequered flag before it fails entirely?Will you use team orders to keep one of your drivers at the top of the table, or will you let them race it out? Will you spend an extra second in the pits for one more lap’s worth of fuel so you can dial up the engine power for a late attacking charge? Will you make a big money play for a new driver or poach a rival mechanic, or will you save the cash to spend big on a theme park at your race team headquarters to rake in more regular cash? Motorsport Manager never stops asking questions of you, and I’m actually quite enjoying the strain of leadership so far.White explains it was “massively” satisfying discovering that, following the success of Motorsport Manager on mobile, they weren’t the only people who wanted this game to exist. The Playsport team is also very happy with the level of feedback they’ve received from players to date.“When we started this game the mobile fans said they wanted more. They wanted more detail; they wanted something they could sit down with for a bit more than just 10 minute play sessions. We’ve taken all that and stuck it all on Post-It notes at the beginning of the project and tried to build the game we wanted to make.“We don’t have the license but all of us are massive motorsport fans and we wanted to make a game that’s really fun. There’s a community out there that want this; it’s great.”Motorsport Manager is focussed purely on open-wheel racing for now but there are plenty of ways White feels the game could grow going forward.“I understand at the moment we’re only open-wheel, but the game is called Motorsport Manager so there’s lot of other areas we’d love to explore, [like] different series,” says White, explaining they also often get asked about multiplayer.“You can already see how that would sit with this game,” he says. “You’d love to have the rivalry with your friends and your friends’ teams. So there’s loads of areas we could explore – I feel like we’re only at the beginning, really.”“We’re a relatively small team – there’s only 12 of us in the office – so creating this really core, fun single-player experience with all that feedback has really been our priority. I feel like we’re there with that and, hopefully, if this is successful we can start moving on to those other areas. We know there are lots of other genres in motorsport and we know there are lots of fans that are very specific; we’d love to bring some more of that into play.”

Luke is Games Editor and resident revhead at IGN's Sydney office. You can find him on Twitter