F1 Classics is a brand new game mode that brings iconic cars, drivers and circuits from the history of F1 into Codemasters F1 2013.

We started work on licensing this content a long time ago. Very early on it became apparent that licensing a full season would be almost impossible in terms of actually locating drivers and establishing who owns the rights to the car, sponsors, etc. What would we do if we couldn’t get particular teams and drivers, which has been the case, and what do we do about teams and drivers who sadly are no longer with us? Not having a full replica car & driver grid would seriously jeopardise the quality of that experience, and on top of that, matching all of the tracks to a particular season would incur a huge investment of time (4-5 years) and money, and the appetite for this content is here now.

When we were discussing what people actually wanted in terms of mass market appeal, it was only really the ‘big’ teams and the most famous iconic drivers that people really wanted to experience. Therefore we have created a much more flexible game design for F1 Classics, giving us much more freedom to approach a multitude of superstar drivers and enabling us to deliver a truly amazing experience of historical, well known names and brands for this, our first attempt. This added flexibility enabled us to come up with a huge wish list of teams and drivers to approach, and we are hugely excited by our final line-up.

Split across two ‘celebration of the decade Goodwood style events’ (F1 Classics: 1980s and 1990s), players will have the chance to race a range of classic F1 cars, against both original and former ‘legendary’ F1 guest drivers, on historical iconic F1 circuits, recreated to the audio and visual style of the television coverage of the day, all of which will be introduced by the most famous voice in motorsport, Murray Walker.

Teams have been chosen on their historic significance, with specific cars not simply chosen on performance. Each team will race with at least one of the original drivers piloting their cars (where possible), with a former ‘legendary’ F1 guest driver piloting the second car. Former ‘team legend’ guest drivers have been allocated based on a strong and obvious association with that particular team, and as such F1 Classics reunites 10 legendary F1 World Champions from across the years. For fans of a global sport this is huge as many of the territories have a ‘hero’ driver.

Historic circuits have been selected for layout variety, popularity and era association and are ideally matched to the cars on offer; Brand Hatch, Jerez, Imola and Estoril.

All of this amazing content is brought to together for the first time in a Codemasters Formula One experience that has innovated and taken a giant leap into the retro field. No other game has matched the number of teams we offer, or as many real Formula One circuits, or offered the amazing driver line-up we have in both a singleplayer and multiplayer experience. Of course we’re always looking to improve our games year on year so we are continuing to negotiate and explore options to further increase the team, car and driver line-up in subsequent years. This is just the beginning.