Bitdefender Advanced Threath Defense proved to be the issue. Made an exemption for F1_24.exe and YES. FINALLY. The game starts,
Mind you, still think this is a serious issue. Yes, I do now have a working workaround, but the need to disable both Windows CFG protection as Bitdefender ATD protection means to me that the F1 24 application is doing some seriously shady stuff.
I do not want to have to disable security just to run an EA game. That security is there for a reason, especially on a laptop where my 13yo is playing games online with sometimes toxic and abuse people out there.
If this workaround is known, it is just too easy for a malicious party to post a YouTube video titled ‘WORKING F1 24 CRASH FIX’ with instructions to disable these features, added with the instruction to download a malicious version of F1_24.exe.
And that is even assuming that EA is not compromised itself, which is also not sure as many companies nowadays are hacked already in the supply chain or code repositories.
So please fix! Now that you should know what the issue is.