Update 0.3.0 — Build Your Own Car, Hidden Traits, and Live Practice

This is the biggest update we’ve shipped. 0.3.0 turns the pre-season into a real engineering project — you now build your own car before lights-out — and it adds a whole layer of discovery on top of it: parts carry hidden traits you only uncover by running the car. On race weekends, free practice is now playable live, notable incidents get broadcast-style replays, and the AI races a lot smarter. Here’s the full rundown.

Build your car each pre-season

The headline feature: your engine supplier delivers the engines, but everything else you manufacture yourself. Each pre-season you decide how much to invest in the machine before the season starts.

  • R&D Design as Work-Unit projects. Designing parts costs Work Units, not cash. Run several projects at once, allocate Work Units per GP, and finish faster by focusing. Design a brand-new part — or fix a discovered negative trait on a part you’re already running.
  • R&D Production tab. Completed designs become reusable blueprints — manufacture as many copies as you like, paying per piece. Choose standard delivery (arrives after the next GP, cancellable for a refund) or rush delivery (+50% for parts right now).
  • Part quality system. Every manufactured part rolls a quality tier — Poor / Normal / Good / Very Good / Perfect — driven by your infrastructure, with a trade-off between immediate performance and development head-room. Shown as colored chips and odds throughout R&D.
  • Debt-funded builds + 3-strike bankruptcy. You can order parts and build the car even into the red. Bankruptcy is now declared only after three consecutive GPs finished in deficit (with warning emails), instead of an instant game-over.

If you’d rather not micro-manage it, the pre-season Car Review offers a one-click Auto-Build (recommended) or full manual building in R&D.

Hidden traits — discovered on track

This is the part of 0.3.0 we’re most excited about. Parts can secretly carry character-defining modifiers — Overweight, Overheating, Lightweight, Low/High Drag, Ground Effect, draft and dirty-air bonuses, brake-lockup and gearbox flaws, and more.

The twist: their effects are always active, even before you know they exist. You discover them by running the car. Suspicions surface live — a radio call, an event, an engineering email — and confirm with mileage. Focused free-practice runs speed up discovery, so practice finally has a real strategic purpose.

The Undercut — discovered and suspected car-part traits shown as color-coded icons with tooltips

Discovered and suspected traits show up as color-coded icons (green good / red bad) with explanatory tooltips, laid out cleanly across the Car app, your run plans and your mail. A global Observations panel lists every suspected and discovered trait, and suspected ones deliberately hide which part carries them until you’ve confirmed it — preserving the discovery loop.

It doesn’t stop at your parts: tyre suppliers also roll hidden characteristics each season (faster or slower wear, a wider optimal window), affecting every team running that supplier.

Driveability vs. complexity

A new car-character trade-off sits on top of all this: an easy slow car versus a fast complex one. A forgiving car suits lower-skill drivers; a complex, high-ceiling car only rewards intelligent ones. It’s surfaced in a dedicated Car Character panel so you can match the machine to the driver in the seat.

Play free practice live

Free practice is no longer something you only simulate — you can now run it yourself like a qualifying session, managing stints, tyres, fuel and hot laps in real time. Alongside it:

  • Unlimited qualifying stints — launch as many runs as the 30-minute timer allows, with a manual Start Stint control and a Hot Laps stepper.
  • Cancel a pit order (“Stay out!”) — while your car is still on track, call off a pending stop, with a radio call to the driver.

Broadcast-style live replays

A rolling buffer now records recent action during a session. Notable moments — crashes, spins, overtakes, mechanical DNFs — appear in an on-track EVENTS window. Click one for a broadcast-style replay with a cinematic camera, then drop straight back into the live race.

The Simulate screens got a big upgrade too: Simulate Race / Qualifying / Practice now show the real textured circuit with cars as labelled colored dots, a loading screen, and a speed selector (pause up to MAX, remembered between sessions).

Manage your team mid-season

The My Team app now lets you Fire, Promote, Switch and Hire drivers directly — mid-season as well as pre-season. Supporting that:

  • Persistent career stats. All-time Starts / Wins / Podiums / Titles now accumulate across seasons and transfers, with two new World Data ranking tabs (Driver Career, Team Career).
  • Driver buyouts now equal the full remaining contract value, so the top names are genuinely hard to poach.
  • Mid-season offers resolve at the end of each GP with email feedback.

Smarter racing

The AI got a serious strategy pass:

  • Cars save engine and fuel under Safety Car, turn the engine up to chase or pull away, lift-and-coast to save tyres, and read live tyre degradation to time their stops. A visible 1-stop vs. 2-stop spread now emerges naturally, driven by driver aggression.
  • Driver form / momentum — drivers drift through good and bad phases over a race, creating catch-ups and order changes without changing who’s genuinely fastest.
  • Realistic out-laps — AI cars stagger their pit exits and build a gap, so hot laps run on clear track.
  • Pit stops feel right — refuelling is slow enough that heavy fills take longer than tyre-only stops, so durations vary and read clearly.
  • The AI now anticipates narrow corners and cedes early when there’s no room to run two abreast.

Presentation & UI

  • Arcade main-menu overhaul — a procedural circuit builds on the launch loading screen, then plays as a live animated background behind the menu, with the logo, menu and news card animating in.
  • Pre-season milestone diagram — a connected 6-step stepper (Infra → Sponsors → Suppliers → Drivers → Car → Dev) shows exactly where you are at a glance.
  • My Car and My Team restyled to match the hub (raised purple headers, supplier logos, brand fonts), and main-menu buttons given more depth.
  • Contextual live-session tutorials for your first replayable incident and your first trait discovery.

And a stack of fixes

Plus the usual deep stack: mid-weekend saves no longer lose progress (you get Resume/Abandon instead of a half-applied state), bankrupt AI teams correctly release their drivers and suppliers, championship standings finally have a tie-break (wins, then podiums), UI symbols and logos no longer render as black squares, and the Settings audio sliders actually save now.

As always, if you hit a bug:

  1. Keep Race Debug Dumps ON (Settings → Display, default),
  2. Reproduce the issue,
  3. Zip the matching debug/race_<ts>_gp<NN>/ folder,
  4. Drop it on Discord with a short description.

This was a huge one. Thank you to everyone testing, reporting and wishlisting — almost every line above grew out of your feedback. See you on the grid.

Wishlist The Undercut on Steam · Join the Discord

— Staz