I can’t quite imagine what it would be like to be a racing team manager myself, although the prospect of a chunky sum of cash and worldwide travel does have a certain appeal to people like me. Taking that into account, I’d probably still sit there on the pit wall being a miserable git that I wasn’t driving one of the cars instead of staring at a monitor with a headset on, so perhaps it’s for the best I haven’t managed to get myself a role as boss somewhere along the grid.

There’ve not been that many racing management games for one reason or another, with the genre kicking off and then dying within a pretty short time period during the mid-to-late 90s. It was with a mixture of curiosity and concern, therefore, when I decided I’d spend the grand sum of £10 on RTL Racing Team Manager a week or so ago having found it in a bargain bin, as my time with Microprose’s Grand Prix Manager series was very enjoyable indeed. It was only a tenner, right, so what could go wrong?

Quite a lot as it turns out, leading to an unhealthy amount of facepalm moments and utter mind-numbing boredom. I am as dedicated an F1 fan as you’re ever going to find and the prospect of running UltraNinjas F1 was tantalising enough, but when it became clear that the game boiled down to a never-ending series of mouse clicks and an unsatisfying race section the prospect of fun expired as quickly as a BMW 09 spec F1 engine.

The issues with the game are many and varied, so perhaps it’d be best to run through that short stint with UltraNinjas F1 to give you an impression. First up, you get to select which team you’d like to control from a list, although those expecting any kind of F1 licensed stuff are in for a shock when you notice drivers such as Lewis Davidson and Kim Roffen driving for teams like Japan Racing and Larry’s Racing Team (I kid you not). In any case, I selected my team and then found out I had two drivers of no ability at all to front my new squad; they were so bad that I have subsequently forgotten their names. Let’s call them Barry and Peter.

With Barry and Peter onboard the game threw me straight into the main menu and… er… left me to it. Being a fan of F1 and knowing how previous management games worked I just-and-just managed to find the relevant screens and sort staff levels and design priorities correctly, but for anyone new to the ins and outs of an F1 team the lack of a tutorial is a huge, glaring omission and will leave the majority of people scratching around not having a clue where to get started.

Not that having an idea where to start things off turned out to be much help as it happened, as it also became quickly apparent that the game’s difficulty when starting as a new team was off the chart. Merely building parts for the UltraNinjas car as the old ones wore out and purchasing engines left me operating at a massive loss due to only being able to choose tiny sponsors from the get-go, and many a race was had where poor Barry and Peter had to trudge around in knackered equipment about four seconds a lap off everyone else. As a result, Barry’s moral plummeted downward and he started making mistakes.

Once in that vicious cycle it becomes apparent that there really is no way out at all. Poor performances in our first year meant no nice upgrades or cash for more staff to develop the UltraNinjas 2, and with a bad car the second season went even worse. Whereas Grand Prix Manager rewarded skilful use of cash and resources and allowed a manager of a new team to climb the ranks if he knew what he was doing, Racing Team Manager relentlessly punishes you at every step and makes the whole game a real drag. Taking an existing team from the list made things slightly more bearable, but it didn’t solve the game’s other major issue.

This is, unfortunately, that it’s somewhat of an unintuitive, poorly presented mess. The game’s menu runs along the bottom of the screen and features plenty of sub sections to click through, but it’s a densely packed wilderness that actually requires you to remember where certain sections are. When a game starts making you feel as if you need to learn the menu system, you know you’re in trouble. Likewise, some of the sections (such as the constructing of parts and vehicles) are basic at best and require you to manually click and drag every piece at a time for both internal and external parts, which quickly becomes old.

Race day options are frustratingly limited too, with the game allowing you to change tyre compound, fuel and wing levels and… erm… nothing else at all. Barry and Peter would drive around the circuit at not-so top speed and instead of informing me about any changes they wanted making, would chirp out things like ‘oof, I lost a position!’ (hilarious, given that he’d just stopped in the pits DURING A SODDING PRACTICE SESSION) and such, and in Barry’s case he became so useless that I once left him out on track until he ran out of fuel so he’d just shut the hell up.

The other overriding issue with the game is that you never get that sense of occasion or satisfaction from the game given its unlicensed nature, with all the drivers and teams being fictional and some of the circuits just being plain wrong. The graphical level, whilst perhaps not necessarily important in a manager game but helpful nonetheless, is cluttered and, in the case of the 3D race highlights, so dated you may as well be playing a 10-year old game.

The net result is a clumsy, unattractive and uninteresting take on what can be a really involving, enjoyable niche genre. The sheer fact that I, as an F1 enthusiast and someone who really enjoyed and dearly misses the Grand Prix Manager series, couldn’t get any enjoyment out of the thing should be pointer enough that this one is a pretty spectacular miss, so probably best you either dig that old copy of Grand Prix Manager out of the cupboard or just hang on and hope this ever comes out. As for good ol’ Barry and Peter… let’s just say they’re now reduced looking for commentary positions at local radio stations. Poor sods.