This is something that has been asked for since the beginning of time… or at least for the last few years!
There’s been quite a few hypotheses for why it hasn’t been so. There were opinions that the teams weren’t keen on signing off on the ability to modify car performance, or that the licence mandated that it had to reflect the real world performance. Unless F1 Manager had a different licence descriptor, then that’s probably not correct as you could amend those stats.
Another opinion was that the driver/car balance was finely tuned to stop one combination being super-dominant, or super-awful. However, that’d mean it would fall apart whenever a driver transfer occurred, you’d think. However, I regularly see the same driver transfers happening so it’s not something completely able to be ruled out, but seems unlikely.
My personal opinion was always resourcing. If everyone has unique game parameters then finding a bug and fixing it for all players takes longer. Like, what if the issue only occurs if Max drives for Kick Sauber around Hungary, for example? You’d have to rule out that it happens for other drivers in other cars at other tracks first. The fewer variables, the easier it is to fix a problem for all users as well. Considering the bug/fix ratio that the game supposedly has, would you want it to take longer for fixes? Probably not. When it was Codemasters, money wasn’t infinite and there just wasn’t the manpower to track down and squash all the possible bugs. Now that it’s EA, there would be more resource.. but would there be enough drive to do it? I don’t see F1 games as much of a cash cow as the football, basketball or whatever games so they’re probably resourced proportionally. However, I could be entirely wrong!
I’d love control over driver transfers at the very least. It annoys me when stupid things happen. Like last year, Norris moved to backmarkers Williams and stayed there for 7 seasons doing jack-all. Red Bull replaced Perez with Verschoor who stank the place out for 5 seasons.
