Is there a manual for F124?

When you are on the settings screens with all the tiles try pressing Y / Triangle (should show you in the top right). They hide various settings depending on which "mode" you're in trying to simplify things for newer players.

There's not an official manual, but if you have questions you can ask Cpayne32 , ScarDuck14 or myself as we're the helpful regulars around here.

No there isn't a manual.  Your best bet is to search on YouTube for videos. There's plenty of beginners guides out there that are more helpful than EA. 

if you can explain more I should be able to help you out. But I'm not sure what you mean by the difficulty tile disappearing.    

Forget that.  Follow Ragebeards suggestion. It should clear things up for you.  Set it to expert so you get all game settings made available to you 

Doh beat me to it.   You posted as I was typing 😂

That's the problem. I have the settings in Expert mode (just because it shows all the settings, not because I'm an expert at this game), but I started a career months ago and I play whenever I can, but as I got better, the difficulty level is a bit low. I'm winning all the races without much effort. Doesn't mean that I'm that good, but I think I set the difficulty to 5 when I started and now I would like to raise it to 10-15 and see what happens.

But the Difficulty tile has gone away. Or maybe it's just not available once you start a career, which would be pretty bad game design because most people don't have the time to do a career in a day or two. But that's why I was hoping there was some kind of manual that would tell me that a) the difficulty tile is supposed to be there all the time, which would mean this is a bug, or b) that once you start a career, it goes away.

Ok have you covered. When you enter a new race weekend.   On the screen before you get into the car's cockpit.  Where you can view upcoming race details and your email along with other gameplay features such as R&D .  Press option button on your controller/wheel.  It'll bring up game settings.  There you will find difficulty slider.   You can change difficulty before every practice session, qualifying and race.   Just be aware you can't change difficulty during each session 

Thanks! Actually I realized that this afternoon and I was coming back here to say Oops! Found it!

Now, is there a way to skip the long part with the lady at the beginning of a career? It was cool the first time, but now every time I start a career I have to listen to the whole thing, which is kinda boring. Is there a way to skip all that?

And the other thing I don't understand is this. When you choose the short career format, to make the races 5 laps, each practice is set to be 30 minutes long. It's kind of ridiculous. If you choose the short races, obviously it means you don't have much time to play, and while you can do the quick practice (which may be quicker but takes time itself), it would still be good to do a short practice, but I'd be happy if I could do a ten minute practice, then qualifying, then race. There's no way to shorten the practice time for on-track practice, right?

Practice sessions can be fast forwarded or skipped to the end.   I do 50% race distance so all full length practice sessions are enabled.  I do the practice programs in FP1.  Fast forward to the end.  Spend abit of time in FP2 fiddling with my setup. Then skip FP3 entirely.

You can skip certain parts. But not others.  During the cut scenes of her chatting.  If you tap any button.  I believe a hold button to skip pops up in bottom right of screen.   But I can't be sure.. I may be thinking of F1 22 or 23.  I'm not a fan of F1 24.  Only played if for a fraction of time i played previous years games and havnt played it for atleast 6 months.   

This is a very cool game, but I wish there weren't so many things that made you waste time to advance the career. I'm a videographer and motion designer, so I really like what they did with the F124 animated logo, but after seeing it as a sort of a transition between game sections, it's getting really old. And the discussions with other teams, to me those are pointless too. This is not "Race to Survive". I start with a team and I want to do the whole career with that team.

All these things are not long in themselves, it's when they repeat over and over that they add up to a lot of time.