0.5.5 is a major update. Its theme is who does the work: any department can now be handed to an assistant, a career can be watched rather than driven, and the whole interface has been reworked — dark mode included. The season becomes a real 52-week calendar, contracts gain real clauses, and R&D has been rebalanced to last longer.

The full list is long. The sections below are ordered by impact.

🤖 Automation and spectator mode

Automation per department

Every department — and the race weekends themselves — can be set to one of three modes:

  • Manual — every decision stays with the player, as before.
  • Semi — the orientation is set once (sponsors first, an aero focus, a pay driver in the reserve seat…) and the assistant works within it.
  • Auto — the assistant runs the department entirely.

Each department is set independently, and the mode can be changed at any point in the career. See Automation.

Spectator mode

With the race weekends on Auto, a career can be watched instead of managed: practice, qualifying and the race run on their own, live or simulated. Combined with full department automation, a whole season can play out with no input at all.

End-of-week report

Before every advance, a single report sums up the week: the season strip, unspent work units, what still needs doing, and the paddock news — biggest names first.

🎨 UI overhaul and dark mode

  • Dark mode for the whole interface.
  • A new live-race HUD: the two team drivers sit as cards at the bottom centre (position plate, helmet, flag), with the radio speaking inside the card. A pause button frames the track view in white with PAUSED while the race is held. The timing tower writes names as M.VERSTAPPEN, and the gap row shows each neighbour’s position and last lap.
  • Sector gap display in qualifying: a broadcast card shows the gap to the session benchmark at each sector line, coloured purple / green / yellow.
  • Pit wall, rebuilt: a tyre diagram of every stint, a gaps-and-battles board (DRAFT / CLOSE / HUNTING), a new Pit Strategy panel showing where a car would rejoin, and Result, Data and Track screens in the timing tower’s style.
  • Race debrief, redone: standings with the podium picked out, driver morale, the championship around the team, each sponsor’s cheque and mood, and a full money breakdown.
  • Hub — Team info panel: car ratings and five gauges placing the team on the grid (cash, staff, car performance, fans, notoriety).
  • Car and driver traits explain themselves: hovering a car trait lists each effect in figures (e.g. cornering speed +0.6 %); trait icons now show their real grade colour, and driver traits get icons too.
  • A minimum text size of 14 px, an on/off switch per sound family, the full country list, and emails that follow the selected language.
  • Chinese, Japanese and Korean language packs now display correctly, with bundled fonts and proper CJK line breaking.

⚖️ Balance

R&D: a longer grind

  • Part development is slower: half the head-room, and each improvement now costs 30 work units.
  • A new design starts from the improved part — except a mandatory regulation part, which starts from scratch.
  • The AI develops and races fragile parts the same way players do.

Car and tyres

  • Engine and top speed matter a little less; brakes and aero matter more.
  • Tyres fall off a real cliff, Softs most of all: a Hard at 35 % wear now laps as fast as a Soft at 60 %.
  • Softs and Hards are closer (about half a second a lap) — an all-Soft four-stop sprint no longer beats a one-stop.
  • Malfunctions cost tenths, not seconds: 0.2–0.7 s a lap for flat spots and graining, up to 1.5 s for a power loss.
  • Overweight and Lightweight parts now change pace only, not reliability.

Racing and strategy

  • More realistic racing in traffic: a following car no longer brakes for a corner only the car ahead has reached, so cars close up and attack more naturally.
  • Strategy follows the new tyres: practice wear is measured at race conditions, and the AI planner prices the Soft and the cliffs the way the race does.
  • The AI no longer gambles on punctures near the flag, and stops before crossing the danger line on long laps.
  • Race tallies count what is visible: mistakes are spins and crashes, overtakes are passes made on track.
  • The calendar moves: venues sign 1- to 6-season contracts, and less-raced venues can take a free slot. A custom circuit pool is drawn at random.

🏁 Custom career

Custom (Advanced) career setup is open to every player, on its own screen: 10 to 20 rounds, 8 to 14 teams, the points scale and the 107 % rule, the starting year, session lengths and qualifying format, the allowed engine architectures (V8, V10, V12), which championships run, real race lengths, and custom .circuit tracks with a custom circuit pool. Mod packs can set every one of these options. See Career setup.

A career also starts with a difficulty (Simulation, Easy, Very Easy), stored with the career rather than the installation.

📅 A 52-week season

Real dates, played breaks, and a Season tab showing what every week is.

📝 Contracts with teeth

  • Sponsors set special conditions: a driver of their nationality, a famous line-up, trade exclusivity, or their colour locked on the car (title sponsor only). Negotiation works both ways, and reputation gives a head start. See Sponsors.
  • Engine supply is a ladder: works partner, or client level 1, 2 or 3, chosen at signing. Each level costs more, and what a motorist offers depends on its prestige and the team’s.
  • Client seats are scarce: each category holds just enough client contracts for the grid, plus one.
  • AI teams chase works deals from the first weeks of the window, and a completed deal left unsigned can be taken by a rival.
  • Driver contracts gain equal status and race / qualifying bonuses with a target position. Drivers have a year of birth, a mood face, and fame that has to be earned.
  • A manufacturer may buy into a team, and a failing team can be bought out instead of folding.

🏎️ Race weekend

  • Free practice pitwall: programme progress, a micro-sector heat map, and the driver’s feedback on every lap. See Free practice.
  • A plan vs reality band on the Strategy screen, which now also shows each driver’s qualifying result.
  • Failures and malfunctions can now happen in practice and qualifying.
  • A car can be retired from the pit window, and a stop can take no fuel.
  • Swap a part between sessions from the truck’s spares, for 5 work units. Damaged spares are no longer offered.
  • New option: hide rival cars’ fuel, tyres and engine map (on by default).
  • Safety car: a yellow frame around the track view, and “SAFETY CAR IN THIS LAP” when it comes in.

💾 Saves

  • Save Manager: save, load, rename and delete at any time. Loading a manual save first backs up the current career. See Save Manager.
  • Save Editor, a new browser tool.

🛠️ Modding

  • Rename any series and change its home country.
  • Pack format v3: a motorist’s V8, V10 or V12, and each team’s engine client level.
  • Circuit Editor: spline editing, pit-lane drawing, undo / redo (Ctrl+Z / Ctrl+Y).
  • Custom images per team and per driver — top-down car, race suit, face, helmet — either kept as painted or recoloured in team colours.
  • A pack can set the size of the generated driver pool (400–2000).

See Modding overview.

🔧 Notable fixes

  • Pack motorists always raced a V10.
  • A mod pack could leak into a game started without one.
  • The calendar dropped its last two rounds.
  • Practice gains went to the wrong driver when a reserve was on the roster.
  • A crash when opening an app from the end-of-week report.
  • Cut-off lists in the race data centre.
  • The career sidebar stayed in English.
  • Pit garages and pit walls drawn on the track at hand-curated circuits.
  • A part could carry two opposite traits (Poor Synchronisation and Smooth Gearshift) — existing saves are repaired on load.
  • The safety car dived into the pits halfway round the lap, mostly on long circuits.
  • Perfect-trait icons showed red.
  • Tooltips showed through pop-ups.

Next

Development now moves to 0.6.0 — Weather & Car Setup, the first of the headline updates on the roadmap. Bug reports remain most useful through the in-game report tool or the Discord — with a save file attached whenever possible.

The Undercut on Steam · Join the Discord

— Staz