You can also buy a Classic Edition of the game, which adds six cars from the 1990s, drivers including Michael Schumacher, Eddie Irvine and David Coulthard, and the tracks Imola and Estoril (that 1990s pack will also be available as downloadable content). And you can take on, or pretend to be, legendary drivers like Nigel Mansell, Alain Prost, Damon Hill, Emerson Fittipaldi and many more. There are two tracks – Brands Hatch and Jerez, in their 1980s configurations, both of which have long since fallen off the Formula One calendar. But in F1 2013, you can choose from five cars from the 1980s – ravening beasts with turbocharged engines, some of which even have the swiftly outlawed ground-effect skirts that suck them to the tarmac. Not since 2006's F1 Championship Edition (a PS3 exclusive, from a time when Sony held the Formula One games licence) has a Formula One game contained any cars from days gone by, and even then, you could only drive them in time-trials. Boot up F1 2013, negotiate the Young Driver Test (which dictates the car you will be allowed to pilot in Career mode), and you will find a new menu item entitled F1 Classics. So adding cars of yore to the equation adds another level of licensing complexity, but with consummate skill (and, one suspects, infinite patience), Codemasters has somehow managed to pull off that juggling act. The corporate nature of the F1 world dictates that, in any game depicting it, every sponsor's logo, advertising hoarding and so on has to be authentic, which is why it's physically impossible for developers to get their games out before a chunk of each season has passed. That's because the latest iteration of its expensively licensed game charting the pinnacle of motorsport contains something that motorsport enthusiasts have wanted for years: retro cars, drivers and tracks. F or Formula One fans, F1 2013 is an item of rare desirability – but strangely, that is due more to Codemasters' skill at negotiating political minefields, rather than its programming prowess.