ANTICHEAT - CTD

now the game wont go past EA anti cheat again 

Problem possibly fixed.

I realized that my AIO (waterpump corsair H150i elice LCD xt) was dying without telling me.  I had suspicion because during windows reinstall i had BSOD which didnt make sense to me. It was hard to spot as i initially suspected the usual suspct (failing cpu, motherboard, ram...). I was fortunate enough to have 2 exact same configs so i could swap harware at will. RAM was ok, cpu was ok, we had left Motherboard or watercooling. After watercooling, windows installed flawlessly. The nvidia driver that I recently had to get 7zip to unzip as self extracting gave me CR error (although downloaded file was correctly downloaded from other computer and working there) and those BSOD (I had like 2 in january and now during reinstall) along with the ANTICHEAT failing put me on the hunt for bad hardware. So couple days troubleshooting but it seems fixed.

IMPORTANT INFORMATION FOR EVERYONE READING THIS  :

If you are using STEAM and have your library on a seperate hard drive like me, in my case, I couldnt point newly freshly installed steam on new windows to my steam libraries and 80GB or so of F1 2025+2026 season pack. It simply would not work, anti cheat error and so on. I see 2 possibilitiers 1. maybe the previous redownload of the game a few days ago when i started to encouter silent CTD was corrupted (giving watercooling issues) 2. EA GAME and there anti cheat, anti piracy software requires fresh install. 

If you swap CPUs -> make sure you are careful with motherboard socket -> remove paste and clean (using isopropyl) cpu and around before removing cpu. Do not, i repeat, do not bend pins of the CPU sockets or get thermal paste all over (3 motherboard came new from amazon.de and fr in 2023 with such defects).

I will report tomorrow morning, if the game still running, that means the overnight test is a success. 

EA_Barry​  thanks for trying to help

I also got an AC anti-cheat system issue. Mine is locked on the screen "Starting the game..." forever; F1_25.exe shows suspended in the task manager. After around 1 minute, the AC will be terminated. No error code, no event, no crash, no game, nothing. 

After investigating into it, I found there are 2 USB devices showing an error state in my Device Manager. And digging deeper, I found that it was through my USB switcher; the switcher faulty bridged the two individual lines, so another line's hub, which had a card reader for the laptop, was being recognized from my main PC. And actually the devices connected via the USB switcher are still working; it just simply faulty bridged the two main lines together. 

I tried to disable the faulty devices from Device Manager and from Group Policy; neither helped.

Simply get another USB switcher, and everything will be back to work.

It doesn't mean your symptom is due to the same reason, but definitely, an incorrectly connected USB device might impact the AC. So I assume the AC will scan all physical devices and check some hardware information. If something is wrong, the AC will be terminated intentionally or unintentionally with an error dump. And the USB device might not be the external one; it also could be the fans, screens for the cooler, hardware monitor devices, etc., whichever is connected through the motherboard's USB pins or original USB ports.

So if you cannot figure out the root cause, it might be worth a try to disconnect some connected USB devices.

er605ay6v5n8​ 

You are welcome. Thanks for the update, fingers crossed your issue is resolved for good. EA_Barry.

EA_Barry​ problem fixed. Bad IAO (waterpump) + need to fully reinstall the game (no use of steam previously downloaded game possibly corrupted or F1 2025 simply needs a full new reinstall) QQstarSS​ thanks for the hint, my issue was different as you can read here.

Hope my story helps some.