R&D — Production

Designs are blueprints, not parts. The Production tab is the factory floor where a blueprint becomes a physical unit you can bolt onto a car. It is the one R&D tab that spends money instead of Work Units, and one of only three tabs open during pre-season — where you build all three cars.

How to open it

• Car icon → Production (tab 6).
• Design-ready emails carry an Open R&D → Production button that lands here directly (RndScreen::new_production()).
• Reachable during pre-season, alongside Inventory and Private Testing, while the rest of R&D is greyed out.

Known Designs — one row per component

The table lists one row per component, showing that component’s default design (not every version):

The header line also shows your available budget.

Per-piece cost

Production cost equals the reference new-part price:

Choosing the default design

best_design_for auto-picks the highest version number for a component — the one carrying the cumulative improvements and any trait-fix version bump. Choose default overrides that with a specific version.

The default design is not cosmetic. It is what gets reproduced by:

• the Production tab’s Select flow (the popup still lets you page to another version);
• the Repair tab’s New $K emergency purchase;
• the “Fix a Problem” list in the Design tab, which reads the default design’s traits, not the fitted part’s.

The chooser lists every known version newest-first with its spec; a per-row Set button commits it.

The engine has no design. It is supplier-rolled once per season into a shared vintage — every customer of that motorist gets the identical unit. It never appears as a designable part, and a replacement engine is cloned from the best engine you already own (same version, same traits, pristine), not re-rolled.

The Manufacture Order popup

Select opens a modal over the tab:

• Part name + quality badge.
• Version picker — < vN > with an (i/n) counter, so you can build an older spec deliberately.
• Performance and Reliability preview bars.
• Quantity — [−] n [+], clamped to 20 pieces per order.
• Totals — Standard: $X Rush (+50%): $Y.
• A red warning line when the standard total puts the team into the red.

Delivery options

The locked-weekend line spells it out: “Race weekend — rush unavailable (the truck is packed); orders deliver after the GP.” An instant part could not reach the circuit, so the +50% would buy nothing.

There is no budget wall

Production never refuses an order for lack of cash. The team simply goes into the red. Bankruptcy only triggers after 3 consecutive GPs with a negative budget, so short-term build debt is a legitimate strategy — especially in pre-season, when income arrives before the first race. The Repair tab’s emergency New $K purchase follows the same philosophy.

In Production — the pending queue

Standard orders appear in a second panel, “In Production — arrives after the next GP”, listing part + version, quantity, and a Cancel button.

• Queued jobs deliver in the post-race pass: each copy is pushed into inventory as an unfitted spare and an email is sent (“3× Front Wing v4 delivered”).
• Cancel refunds the standard (non-rush) amount — unit_cost × count. Cancelling a rush order is impossible (it delivered immediately), so the refund can never exceed what was charged.
• Pending jobs are lifted by later improvements: propagate_improvements_to_spec raises a queued job’s initial_perf / potential / fiability to the improved spec. Ordering early and developing afterwards is not a trap — the parts arrive at the current level.

Advanced

• Order before the improvement, not after. Because pending jobs are lifted to the improved spec, a spare ordered on Monday and improved on Wednesday arrives at Wednesday’s level. There is no reason to delay an order to “wait for the upgrade”.
• Copies are exact. A design’s stats are frozen at delivery of the project (quality + traits rolled once). Every piece produced from it is byte-identical: same quality tier, same traits, same potential. There is no per-piece luck.
• Build spares of what breaks. A destroyed part is swapped for the freshest spare free of WU cost. With no spare, your only path is a rush purchase at 1.5× — $2.25M for an engine. One $500K floor spare pays for itself the first time a floor is destroyed.
• Pre-season is the cheap window. Instant delivery at standard price and no rush fee, every order. Build the two race cars and the mule there — the mule is what makes Private Testing run at all.
• Watch the Stock column, not your memory. It counts spares of the default version only. Four v2 wings in stock show as 0 once v3 becomes the default.
• Version-paging is a real tactic. An older, cheaper-to-build version with a better trait set is sometimes the right spare. The popup’s < > arrows exist for exactly that.

Common mistakes

• Believing a finished design means a finished part. A completed project only registers a blueprint. Until you produce a copy in this tab, nothing changes on the car.
• Paying the rush fee in pre-season. Every pre-season order is already immediate at standard price. The Rush button is not even shown there.
• Rushing during a race weekend. The button is grey; if you want a part at this track it had to be in the Weekend Loadout.
• Ordering 20 engines because the button allows it. The clamp is 20 pieces, not 20 sensible pieces — that is $30M.
• Forgetting to re-pick the default after a trait fix. A trait fix creates a new version that automatically becomes the newest — usually what you want — but if you had manually pinned an older default, it stays pinned and the fix is never produced.
• Cancelling a job you already improved. The refund is the original cash; the improvement WU spent lifting that job’s spec are not recovered.

See also

• R&D — the Car App Hub — the pools and tab map
• R&D — Design — where blueprints come from
• R&D — Inventory — equipping what you built
• R&D — Repair — the emergency New $K path
• R&D — Improve — how improvements propagate to queued jobs
• Finance — what a build programme does to the budget
• Suppliers — why the engine has no design
• Weekend Loadout — the truck lock