Development Ladder (PF2 / PF3)

Under the PFS sit two federation feeder championships that run in the background of every career: PF2, the Prime Formula Challenge (roughly an F3000 tier) and PF3, the Formula Development Series (roughly an F3 tier). You cannot manage them — but their races are simulated for real, their champions are real drivers you can sign, and the only lever you hold over them is whether you lend one of your academy prospects a seat.

This page documents the ladder page itself and everything behind it.

How to open it

World Data → Series tab → click the PF2 or PF3 row.
PFS Series page → Overview → the DEVELOPMENT LADDER strip at the top has one button per series.
Esc or Back closes it. Three tabs: Standings, Calendar, Regulations.

What PF2 and PF3 are

	PF2 — Prime Formula Challenge	PF3 — Formula Development Series
Ladder tier	2	3
Scope	International	International
Federation origin	United Kingdom	United Kingdom
Reputation	68 / 100	48 / 100
Age rule	18+	16 to 18
Draft window	18–26	16–18
Teams	12	10
Seats	2 race drivers + 1 reserve each (36 total)	2 + 1 each (30 total)
Races	16	12
Points	25-18-15-12-10-8-6-4-2-1 (top 10)	25-19-18-17-…-2-1 (top 20 all score)
TV rights	50 % of the PFS package per team	~16.7 %
Prize pools	50 % of the PFS pools	25 %
Engine	V6, 2.5 L, 400 HP	Inline-4, 2.5 L, 300 HP
Car weight	790 kg	680 kg
Base speed	75 % of PFS	65 % of PFS
Base complexity	150 % of PFS	150 %
Base driveability	150 % of PFS	110 %
Race distance	50 % of a PFS Grand Prix	20 %
Qualifying	One flying lap, one car at a time	Three-stage shootout, top 15 → top 10
Free practice	30 minutes	30 minutes
Refuelling	Banned	Banned
Dry tyres	Soft only	Hard only
Pit stops	At least one is mandatory	Banned
Development	6 spec-frozen components, the rest open	Everything frozen — a true spec series

PF3’s points scale is the ladder’s defining social rule: everyone in the top 20 scores, so a junior with a bad car still builds a record.

The V6 and Inline-4 architectures are not PFS-legal — they exist only down here, and carry their own white balance traits in the simulation.

The five car-spec dials (base speed / complexity / driveability, engine HP, car weight) have per-series sliders in Settings → Career, groups “PF2” and “PF3”. A slider left at 0 means “use the catalogue default”, so re-tuning the catalogue does not fight a stale config.

Standings tab

Three panels.

Driver standings — one row per race driver who has started: rank, helmet + national flag chip, name (clickable → his driver profile), team, points, wins, podiums. Sorted by points, wins as tie-break.

Team standings — rank, procedural team logo + country flag, name, constructor points.

Past champions — year, driver, team, newest first.

Before the season is built

Early in the pre-season the panels are not empty by accident. If the series has not reached its Drivers stage, the driver panel reads “Line-ups are signed during the pre-season negotiation phase — seats are still vacant” and the team panel lists the entered outfits with “Seats to be announced”. That is the ladder building itself in step with your own pre-season (see below).

Name resolution falls back through the driver pool, then the hall of fame, then your academy roster — a prospect out on loan is not pool-listed, so without that fallback a loaned champion would show as a bare three-letter code.

Calendar tab

The series does not have its own circuits: it races on a subset of the PFS weekends. Each row shows the round number, the host country flag, the venue name (clickable → the circuit profile), which PFS weekend it is (PFS weekend 7), and a ✓ / ○ completion mark.

The footer states the rule plainly: the other PFS weekends are free weekends for this series.

The calendar is drawn at the pre-season’s first stage: races of the 20 PFS rounds, sampled without replacement and sorted. PF2 therefore uses 16 of your 20 weekends, PF3 uses 12. Before that stage the tab reads “The season calendar is announced during the pre-season.”

Regulations tab

Six panels, all read from the catalogue and the live Settings dials.

IDENTITY — scope, series reputation, driver age rule, team/seat count, races per season.

CAR SPECIFICATION — engine architecture, displacement and effective HP; car weight; base speed / complexity / driveability as a percentage of the PFS; and the development rule (N spec-frozen components; the rest is open to design, or All parts are spec-frozen).

WEEKEND FORMAT — race distance as a fraction of a PFS Grand Prix, qualifying format in words, practice length, refuelling, dry-tyre rule, pit-stop rule.

POINTS SCALE — the full table, position by position.

FEDERATION SUPPLIERS — the one engine, tyre and fuel supplier allocated to every team, and the seasons remaining on the federation deal. Before the tender is settled it reads “To be announced during the pre-season.” The note explains the selection: the federation allocates one supplier per category for every team, chosen from the global pool on price and market standing.

PAYOUTS — TV rights per team and the championship prize pool, both computed as this series’ fraction of the live PFS figures.

How a round is actually raced

simulate_dev_series_gp runs once per PFS weekend, from the same post-race pass the live game and the headless career simulator both use. It is not an abstraction: the round goes through the real quick-sim engine.

Entry list — every filled race seat whose driver profile resolves (pool first, then your academy for a loaned prospect). Real driver stats: intelligence, pace, consistency, adaptability, stamina, aggressivity.
Spec car — built from the catalogue plus the Settings dials: the mandated engine tuned so its horsepower lands exactly on the effective-HP figure, the series’ driveability factor applied through the familiarity lever, its complexity applied as a Peaky electronics trait, spec-frozen parts at 1.0 for everyone, and the free parts scaled by the team’s hidden strength. PF3 freezes everything — only the driver differs.
Circuit — the weekend’s actual track, through the same build_round_circuit choke point your own weekend uses, with the lap count multiplied by the series’ race-distance fraction (minimum 2 laps).
Race config — the PFS baseline with the base-speed factor applied where the spec says it acts: cornering and braking. Top speed needs no scaling; it already falls out of a 400 or 300 HP engine.
Qualifying, in the series’ own format:
- PF2 — one flying lap. One run, one lap, no second chance. A mistake on the lap costs the grid slot outright.
- PF3 — three-stage knockout. Only the top 15 advance from Q1 and the top 10 from Q2; eliminated cars keep the position their session gave them. Each stage is a fresh short run on new tyres of the mandated compound.
Race — from that grid, everyone on the mandated strategy: full tanks (refuelling is banned), PF2 one stop on softs, PF3 no stop on hards. Real mistakes, malfunctions and crashes produce the retirements.
Tallies — starts, poles, best finish, podiums, wins, top-tens and points from the real classification; constructor points to the team. One clickable news item per round: winner → driver profile, venue → circuit profile, tagged with the series abbreviation.

A round costs roughly 0.2 s, and at most two rounds run on any one weekend.

In-season development (PF2 only)

Every round, each PF2 outfit brings updates to its non-frozen parts:

step = random(0.0008 … 0.0032) × (0.5 + strength) × (0.6 + min(infra,10) × 0.06)
season_dev = min(season_dev + step, 0.06)

Bigger, better-run structures develop faster, so the PF2 order moves during the season instead of being decided by the entry list. PF3, being fully spec, accrues nothing.

The pre-season: the ladder builds itself

The series does not exist fully-formed at the season start. It advances one setup stage each time you close the matching step of your own pre-season:

Your pre-season step	Ladder stage	What is settled
Infrastructure	1	The season calendar is drawn, announced with its opening venue
Sponsors	2	Backers are signed from the shared world pool
Suppliers	3	The federation spec (engine / tyres / fuel) is tendered or carried over
Drivers	4	Line-ups are signed

Each stage pushes a tagged news item. A skipped pre-season (auto-skip, headless simulation) or a mid-progress load is caught by a silent back-fill at the first round, so the ladder can never race with an unbuilt season.

Signings are competitive, and they matter to you

Every negotiation turn of the pre-season Drivers phase, each series signs about a third of its race seats (minimum 4), strongest teams picking first, from the same driver pool the PFS teams are shopping in, at the same time. The top two signings per series per turn get transfer news.

Two rules shape the draft:

Ambition-gated. While the PFS window is open, a free agent whose ambition targets a higher tier refuses the offer — he is holding out for a PFS call. series_tier_target: ambition 65+ targets the PFS, 40–64 targets PF2, below 40 targets PF3. Under-18s never refuse, since the PFS is closed to them anyway. Without this gate the ladder hoovered up the market’s best drivers before PFS teams could move.
Youth-biased. A free agent loses 2 rating points per year over the series’ draft floor. A feeder fields prospects, not veterans.

When the window closes, the phase’s final step fills whatever is left — racing beats sitting at home — and reserves are taken from remaining already-tagged drivers only, never freshly minted.

The season rollover

Runs inside the end-of-season transition, after ageing and retirements, before the season counter increments.

Champions crowned. News item, an entry in Past Champions, and a series-tagged season record written onto the driver’s pool profile (or his academy profile if he was on loan). Flat career counters are bumped at the same time.
Every non-playable series contract decrements pool-wide. At expiry, 60 % re-sign for another 1–3 seasons; the rest become free agents.
Season economy, settled once per team: TV share + championship-prize share + an equal cut of the series' sponsor take − driver salaries − facility running cost (level × $400 k) − development spend (season_dev × $80 M) − base operations.
- Healthy outfits (over $8 M) invest a facility level; teams in the red cut one, with news.
- Below −$4 M the outfit folds: its drivers walk free, and the federation grants the entry to a fresh team with empty seats, signed the following pre-season. Toggle: Settings → Dev → Dev-series bankruptcy (on by default).
Age rotation. A PF3 driver over 18 leaves the series; if his weighted rating is ≥ 58 he graduates to PF2 (with news) instead of being released.
Strength drift. strength += season_dev × 0.8 + random(±0.05), clamped to 0.2–0.9 — a hard-developing outfit trends upward without teleporting.
Federation suppliers age one season; an expired contract is re-tendered at the next pre-season’s Suppliers step.
Sponsors released to the shared pool; standings, points, calendar and setup stage reset to zero.
An end-of-season mail lands in your inbox listing every ladder champion with points, team and runner-up — flagged explicitly as a scouting shortlist.

Driver demography is regulated. Replacement rookies are minted uniformly across 16–21 and fed to PF3 rather than PF3 minting its own, and the retirement intake shrinks by the excess over roughly 420 drivers, so the ladder cannot inflate the world’s population.

Academy loans — your one lever

Once per Grand Prix there is a 25 % chance a dev-series team asks to field one of your academy prospects, if you have an age-eligible one not already on loan.

It arrives as the game’s first interactive mail: an offer body with Accept the loan / Decline buttons inside it. A pending decision mail gates Next GP — you get an “Open Inbox / Continue anyway” dialog rather than being allowed to walk past it silently. Answering keeps the mail in place: the buttons are replaced by the outcome line and the inbox’s red ”!” becomes a green reply glyph.

The fee is weighted rating × 600 per GP in PF2, × 250 in PF3.

If you accept:

The prospect takes a vacant race seat, or if the team is full, the weakest incumbent steps down to reserve.
The fee credits your budget every GP (post-race pass), appears in Finance under an “Academy Loans” income section naming the prospect and his team, and counts in your per-GP net — so it flows into the projection and the hub tiles.
The seat time is worth +5 % development: a 5 % chance of an extra stat-evolution tick each pass. Real racing is the best school there is.
His season record is written on his academy profile, tagged with the series.

Loans are one season and all expire at the rollover. The Academy card carries a loan badge while it runs.

How a ladder record reaches a driver’s profile

The per-season history rows are tagged with the series abbreviation, and the driver profile’s season table shows a coloured Series chip per row (PF2 amber, PF3 green, PFS gold). Legacy rows that stored a team name there render as PFS.
A loaned prospect is not pool-listed, so his profile detects the loan, filters his quick record on the loan’s series, folds in the live standings tally (the flat counters only ingest the season at the rollover) and shows an “On loan to {team}” status line.
The PFS Series page hall of fame subtracts every dev-series row. A PF3 title is a real title on the driver’s profile and on his country’s hall of fame — where he is shown at his most prestigious series with that series’ stats and badge — but it will never rank him among the PFS records.
World Data’s Driver Career tab is all-series and does count ladder results.

The PFS age rule

PFS_MIN_DRIVER_AGE = 18. It is enforced at the UI choke point (you cannot open an approach on a 17-year-old), in every AI, emergency and mid-season recruitment filter, and by a PFS Commission mail backstop in offer resolution. Rookie generation starts at 16 — which is exactly why PF3 exists.

The one exception is the GP-10 mid-season window: a 17-year-old in the final year of his series contract may pre-agree a deal, because he turns 18 at the rollover when the contract actually starts.

Advanced

Ambition is public-ish information. A high-ambition 19-year-old will refuse PF2 seats while the PFS window is open, which is exactly the driver you should be looking at — he is holding out for a team like yours.
Watch PF2’s mid-season order, not its entry list. Open development means the strong outfits pull away as the season runs; a driver beaten early by a better car may be the better driver.
PF3 is the purest signal in the game. Full spec, no development, no pit stops, everyone in the top 20 scoring — the standings are almost entirely driver quality.
The PF2 graduation bar is rating 58. An over-age PF3 driver below it is simply released. Champions and near-champions are the ones who make it up.
A ladder team that folds frees its drivers instantly. The rollover after a bankruptcy is a good moment to look at the free-agent list.
A brand held by a dev team is money you cannot access this season. If a sponsor you wanted shows an amber {ABBR} · this season tag, it comes back at the rollover.
Everything on this page runs in the headless career simulator too, so ladder behaviour can be balance-tested with --sim-career without a second code path.
The world is PFS + PF2 + PF3 only. All legacy non-playable series were removed; a save carrying the old “DS2” tag is remapped to PF2 at load and every other legacy tag is freed.

Common mistakes

Treating ladder results as PFS results. They are subtracted from every PFS record. A “three-time champion” may have won all three in PF3.
Declining every loan. The fee is small, but +5 % development on a prospect compounds, and the seat time is the difference between an 18-year-old you can promote and one you cannot.
Ignoring the Next-GP gate. A pending loan mail blocks the turn with a dialog; “Continue anyway” is available, but the offer is still sitting unanswered.
Signing on flat career counters. A driver’s headline win total may be a PF3 total. Open his profile and read the Series chips.
Expecting to manage a ladder team. PF2 and PF3 are non-playable; the page is read-only and the catalogue’s budget_frac, practice length and loose circuit pool are declared spec waiting for the day they become playable.
Assuming the ladder calendars are fixed. They are re-drawn from the PFS weekends every pre-season.