0.5.0 made the paddock answer back. 0.5.1 does the same for the map — and it lands three weeks and a half before Early Access on September 3.

The calendar stops being the world and becomes a choice made from one: fifty venues exist, twenty of them hold a round this season, and the ones that keep their place have to earn it. A circuit that puts on a show gets renewed; a venue that is dull and dangerous gets dropped for one that has been waiting in the pool. The TV rating that judges them was rewritten twice — once to make it a real score, once because measuring it over 140 races proved the first attempt still handed out stars too easily.

Alongside that: your careers move out of the game folder and into the place Steam Cloud can actually reach, the Steam Deck becomes properly playable on a controller, and a long tail of fixes — including a wrecked car that carried on racing in the standings, and a quit that could drop your last turn.

⭐ Highlights

A world of circuits, and a calendar that breathes

  • A pool of 50 venues is drawn when the career starts (adjustable, 20–60, in Settings → Career) and the season’s 20 rounds are taken from it. Until now the calendar was the world — 20 circuits drawn once and never revisited — so a venue could never be dropped, and none could ever arrive.
  • Every round is on a contract with the series. One season before it expires, the Commission reviews the venue at the GP-15 break: it compares that circuit’s average media rating and its retirements-per-race against the rest of the calendar, and drops it only when both are clearly out of line. A dull but safe track keeps its place. So does a chaotic but thrilling one. What loses a contract is being boring and dangerous.
  • A Circuits tab in World Data lists the whole pool: which round a venue holds and how many contract years are left (or “In pool”), seasons hosted, lifetime average media rating, prestige. Sortable on every column, and every row opens the circuit’s page.
  • A FACILITIES panel on the circuit page. Each venue carries three star ratings rolled once at pool creation and fixed for its life — infrastructure, capacity and safety — and the crowd they imply. Better facilities make a venue likelier to hold a round.

A weekend that costs you parts tells you why

Parts came out of a Grand Prix damaged and you had no way to know what had happened to them. A new post-weekend email now explains it, one section per driver: your chief mechanic walks through each incident — a spin that went wrong, running into the car ahead, being hit from behind — and under the account sit the parts it cost you, laid out like the Repair tab, with quality and condition.

Practice, qualifying and the race all count. A clean weekend sends nothing.

Two follow-ups landed on player reports. The biggest crashes no longer skip the report: a double DNF that wrote off wheels and wings used to produce an empty mail that was then not sent — the weekend that most needed explaining was the one that stayed silent. A write-off is now listed with its verdict instead of a loss percentage. And a mechanical retirement gets its own letter, with an honest diagnosis: a part that was carrying crash damage blames the accident, a part below the reliability standard asks for reliability investment in R&D — and a healthy part that let go anyway is called what it is, plain bad luck.

A TV rating that means something

The old rating handed out a star for each easily-met condition — any overtaking, any safety car, any two retirements — so nearly every race scored 4–5★ and the number said nothing.

It is now a continuous spectacle score: the fight for the win carries the most weight (under a second is a photo finish, twenty seconds is a walkover), then the racing behind it. Then it was measured over 140 headless-career races and recalibrated, because the first rewrite still put 29% of races at 5★ and none below 2★.

Then it was raised again, because two races into a career a tester had a 1★ and a 2★: the bands put the norm at 2★, which read as the press permanently unimpressed by its own flagship championship. A competent race is now worth 3–4★. The score is untouched — only where the stars are drawn on it moved. Media Severity (Settings → Career) still tightens it for anyone who preferred the harsher press.

This matters beyond the number: it is what the contract review reads.

One name, one identity

A save could hold two drivers under the same three-letter code — and every screen keyed on that code conflated them: clicking Yasuhiro Yamaguchi in the Scouting list opened Man-bok Yang’s profile. The code generator can no longer mint a duplicate, existing saves repair themselves at load (the rostered holder keeps the code and his records; the free agent is re-coded, his scouting file following him), and underneath it all every driver now carries a permanent numeric identity — the code is just his name tag.

Hand-drawn circuits had the same disease: every modded track shared one identity, so their race histories and lap records all merged, and a mod calendar minted one duplicate world-pool entry per round. A drawn track now has an identity of its own, derived from its geometry, and existing mod careers are repaired at load.

An engine maker’s palmarès belongs to the seasons it powered

The brand records on the PFS Series page were re-derived from each team’s CURRENT engine supplier. So a departing motorist lost its “most championships” to whoever replaced it, a comeback recovered everything — including seasons it never raced — and the board emptied the moment an exit was merely announced, engines still on the grid. Each season in a team’s history now remembers the brand that actually powered it, and the records read that: a departed motorist keeps its place on the board.

While we were in there: withdrawal announcements now land at the GP-10 summer break, like the real paddock — and the running contracts were, and remain, honoured to their term.

A spin costs you time, not the repair bench

Spins were as expensive as crashes: the spin-out sliding into a wall ran the full barrier-damage pipeline every time. A spin’s wall brush now only damages parts on a rare roll — the dent, the lost track position, the tyre wear and the driver’s shaken confidence all still land, and the Crash event keeps its full consequences. And a lost wheel finally reads as what it is: heavy suspension damage, listed in the damage report, instead of a three-wheeled car with pristine parts and no explanation.

Your careers live where they belong

Careers, replays, screenshots and settings now sit in each platform’s per-user directory — %APPDATA%\TheUndercut, ~/Library/Application Support/TheUndercut, $XDG_DATA_HOME/TheUndercut. Keeping them next to the executable meant Steam Cloud could not sync them and a reinstall could take them with it.

Existing installs migrate on first launch — nothing to move by hand. A portable.txt next to the executable keeps everything in the game folder if you prefer that (USB sticks, DRM-free copies).

Steam Deck — playable on the controller

The pad could already move around the career, but a dozen screens had no binding for what they actually do, and a few actively fought back.

  • Team registration shows its buttons at last; the country filter opens the on-screen keyboard with Select, since reaching it means typing and a Deck has no keyboard.
  • Start ends the turn from any app, instead of sending you back to the hub.
  • Infrastructure becomes usable: right stick to walk the departments, triggers to buy and sell a level. Same idea in the bug report (keyboard on the description, triggers on the severity), in Settings, and in the livery and logo picker.
  • A sponsor row no longer opens its negotiation just because you scrolled past it, and an open popup keeps the focus inside itself.
  • Y disables the tutorial from any card.
  • The opening ceremony answers a tap and shows its controller buttons.
  • Every binding is stamped on the button it presses and echoed in the hint bar, from a single place, so the two cannot drift apart.

🔧 Fixed

A wrecked car kept racing. A big enough driver error left the car stranded on track, raising a yellow flag and calling out the safety car — while the standings and the minimap still showed it running, sometimes in the lead. Thirty seconds later it was parked in the pit box, still listed as a runner, for the rest of the race.

A driver who joined mid-season scored nothing in the standings. A promoted reserve, a mid-season signing or a one-off stand-in banked points and had his own profile updated, but read 0 wins / 0 podiums / 0 DNFs on the standings page. The season’s finish log only had room for the two drivers a team began the year with. It now grows to fit whoever takes the start — which also fixes the countback that separates drivers level on points, the Calendar’s last-race panel, and the wins credited to an engine manufacturer.

The race fuel slider did nothing. The run plan showed and edited one fuel figure, then handed the race a different one — so whatever load you set by hand was silently replaced by the strategy’s. The plan now sends what the slider shows, and with no practice data behind it falls back to the strategy’s load instead of a flat 70 kg.

Leaving a GP and coming back changed the race distance. A weekend rebuilt from the save raced more laps than its calendar entry advertised — 45 instead of 29 on a long circuit.

Quitting could drop your last turn, and always crashed. Closing the window ran no shutdown code at all: a save still being written was lost, and the process died of a segfault on every quit. Separately, one failed save could silently stop a whole session from saving anything further.

The menu flashed black on the Steam Deck when switching app or advancing the turn — an undefined texture read that AMD hardware showed and other vendors happened to hide.

Practice offered a problem that could not be investigated — a suspicion on a part sitting in stock rather than on the car, so the run and its focus bonus were spent for nothing.

Your number 2 destroyed his brakes and front wing every single weekend. He was running an AI team’s practice programme. Plans are built for non-reserve drivers, but the list they were matched against held every driver — so with a reserve on the roster the two lists were different lengths and everything after the reserve shifted by one. The secondary got the first AI driver’s plan, and each AI driver got the plan of the one before them. A reserve sitting in the middle of the roster is what put the player’s own car in the blast radius: an AI race-push programme is 26 laps against the player default’s 14, brake wear is purely distance-based, and the save showed 8.6% brake health on car 1 against 53.6% on car 0 — the same 1.9× ratio, measured from both ends. Below 50% part performance a car cannot start, which is where the Did Not Start lines came from.

Damage could be charged to the wrong car. Which of your two cars a driver was in was worked out from his job title, and four places in the code did it differently — one of them silently charging an unmatched driver’s damage to car 1. With a reserve on the roster the answers disagreed, so a weekend could bill one car for the wear and the other for the incident that caused it. A driver is now bound to a car, which is also what makes it possible, later, to put a reserve in either race car or the mule.

A missing setting could silently switch you onto the wrong engine. A config seeded from an older install lacked the engine-selector keys, and the code’s fallback was the unmaintained legacy engine with pixel contact ON — invisible mesh deformation, silent wheel loss, stranded DNFs nothing could explain. Missing keys now land on what the game actually ships: classic 0.2.7, pixel contact off. Two tests pin the shipped experience so it cannot drift again.

The driver offer popup gave away what Scouting exists to sell. It showed a target’s true stats instead of your estimate of them — on the one screen where those numbers cost money, and contradicting the list you had just come from (“~14” there, “17” in the popup). Estimates now, overall rating included.

The Driver Academy quoted the wrong price — 500 k / 50 k advertised on the Infrastructure line for a department that actually charges 4 M / 150 k.

Engine specs were readable before signing, which left a manufacturer’s valuation carrying no information. They are withheld until signature now; tyre and fuel specs stay visible, being published product lines rather than something rolled at signing.

An unlimited pre-season development exploit is closed, along with a World Data crash on the Fame tab, a replay that could open on an empty timeline, a black band under a scrolled career app, calendar flags painted over the status bar, and a 2 px seam at the bottom of the screen.

📝 Also

  • “Body” is now “Bodywork”. The monocoque is the homologated survival cell — crash-tested, frozen for the season, never developed. What this part models is the bodywork: sidepods, engine cover, coke-bottle. French, Spanish, Italian and German already said so.
  • Existing careers keep working. Every calendar change is additive, and a career started before 0.5.1 gains its circuit pool and series contracts on load rather than silently losing the feature.
  • Settings and PFS Series have their own icons. Both borrowed someone else’s — PFS Series showed the same clipboard as Standings, two rows above it in the same list.
  • Zero build warnings, and paused engines are quiet.

A career saved in 0.5.1 will not open in an earlier build. As always, the alpha’s save format can still change between versions.

See you on the grid

Early Access opens on September 3 at 9:00 CET. Until then, the free demo tracks the latest build — come tell me what breaks.

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— Staz