News (PFS Media)

PFS Media is the paddock newspaper: a dashboard of clickable headlines on the left and four standing panels on the right. It is not a second inbox — nothing here ever blocks you or asks for an answer. It is how you find out what the rest of the world did: rival transfers, rival upgrades, calendar moves, and the rumours that foreshadow both. Every driver, team and circuit named in it is a link to its profile.

How to open it

Sidebar → News (second entry, right under the Hub).
Escape or the window’s Back button closes it.

The title reads PFS Media — <year> Season, and the status bar reads N stories on file · click a name to open its profile.

The headline feed

The left column shows the 12 most recent items that pass the current series filter, newest first. Each card carries:

A category illustration (a per-category newspaper image) on the left.
A team logo beside it, whenever the story references a team.
A category chip in the category’s colour.
A series chip (PF2 / PF3) when the story is tagged to a development series; PFS and general paddock stories carry no chip.
The date: <year> · GP n, or <year> · pre-season for anything with no round attached.
The sentence, with clickable references rendered inline.

If the feed is empty you get “No news yet. Sign drivers, race, and develop the car to make headlines.”; if the filter excludes everything, “No stories match this filter yet.”

Category	Chip label	Colour	Typical stories
Transfer	TRANSFER	green	Signings, releases, retirements, parting ways
Result	RESULT	amber	Race outcomes
Sponsor	COMMERCIAL	gold	Sponsor and supplier market moves
Circuit	CALENDAR	blue	Venues joining or leaving the calendar
Development	TECH	violet	New designs and upgrades introduced
Regulation	REGS	red	Rule changes
Rumor	RUMOUR	brown	Scouting interest, market speculation

Clickable references

A story is stored as a template — "{0} introduce an upgraded Front Wing." — plus an ordered list of (label, target) references. The app substitutes each {n} with an emphasised span that carries the icons inside it, so a reference never breaks across a line:

Target	Inline icons	Opens
Driver	helmet (16×16) + country flag (16×11)	Driver Profile
Team	team logo (26×13)	Team Profile
Circuit	none	Circuit Profile
None	none	Nothing — plain bold emphasis

Links are navy and bold; plain emphasis is dark grey and bold.

Stale circuit links are demoted, not broken. Before drawing, the app collects every circuit_seed on the current calendar. A circuit reference whose seed is no longer there — a venue that left at the rollover, for instance — renders as plain bold text instead of a dead link. Driver and team references are not filtered this way.

Any {n} left over because a story was pushed with fewer references than its template needs is stripped, so a raw {2} never reaches the screen.

The series filter

A row of small buttons above the feed: All · PFS · PF2 · PF3 (one per entry in the development-series catalogue). The active one is charcoal with cream text.

Filter	Matches
All	every story
PFS	untagged stories and stories explicitly tagged `PFS` — general paddock news counts as PFS by convention
PF2 / PF3	that ladder series only

The filter applies to the headline feed and to the Developments and Paddock Rumours panels. It does not apply to Latest Results or In Focus, which always read the PFS championship standings. See Development Series.

The right-hand panels

Latest Results

The top 5 of the current driver championship: position, name (link), team (link) and points. Before the season starts it reads “The season hasn’t started yet.”; with a season but no rounds run, “No results yet this season.” For the full table use Competition.

Developments

The 5 most recent TECH stories that pass the filter, as violet-bordered lines. This is the surface where you find out a rival has introduced an upgraded part — the AI teams’ deliveries are pushed here every time they land, including during a free-weekend window.

In Focus

In season: the championship leader — name, team and points, under the heading CHAMPIONSHIP LEADER. Out of season: your own team under YOUR TEAM, with “Pre-season preparations are under way.”

Paddock Rumours

The 6 most recent RUMOUR stories that pass the filter, as brown-bordered bullets. These are the early-warning system: AI scouting interest in a driver (including yours) is emitted as a rumour all season long, and the “keeping a close eye on…” line before GP 10 is the direct foreshadowing of the mid-season poaching pass. See Scouting and Mid-Season Window.

How long news lives

Two rules, both enforced on every push:

One season. news_feed.retain(|it| it.season >= current_season) — anything stamped with an earlier season is dropped. At the rollover this wipes the previous year outright.
A hard cap of 200 items (NEWS_FEED_CAP); past that, the oldest are drained.

Stories are stamped with the season at push time and with current_gp − 1 as their round (so a story pushed between weekends carries the round just raced; pre-season stories carry round 0).

There is a subtlety worth knowing, because it once made an entire subsystem invisible: news pushed during the rollover about the upcoming season must be dated forward explicitly. A plain push during the transition stamps the old season, and the prune then deletes it seconds later — which is exactly how every supplier-market move (departures, returns, arrivals) went unseen. Calendar arrivals and market moves you see in the first days of a new season are the dated variety.

Advanced

News is world state, mail is your state. Anything addressed to you — contracts, deliveries, offers, reports — is PFS Mail. Anything about the world is here. Nothing in News is ever actionable and nothing here gates a turn.
The thumbnail pass uses the same filtered list as the text. If it did not, the category images would land on the wrong stories when a filter is active.
The feed is your main window on AI development. Rival design deliveries are pushed as TECH stories at the moment they land, including one per delivered part during mid-season free-weekend turns. Watching the Developments panel is the cheapest way to tell whether the field is out-developing you.
A demoted circuit link is information. If a venue you remember is suddenly plain text instead of a link, it has left the calendar — check the Calendar and the Commission’s contract-review mail.
Transfer stories name both sides. Because both driver and team are clickable references, a transfer headline is a two-click route into either profile — faster than going through Standings.
Nothing is archived. There is no “older news” view, no per-season history. What is on this page plus the 200-item cap is the entire feed. The long-term record lives in the PFS Series page’s hall of fame and the profile pages’ career records.
Series chips only appear on ladder stories. An untagged story is PFS; that is why the PFS filter has to match “empty or PFS”.

Common mistakes

Waiting for News to tell you to do something. It never will. The action queue is the inbox’s red ! and the Hub’s alerts.
Filtering to PF2/PF3 and concluding the paddock is quiet. The filter also empties Developments and Rumours; switch back to All.
Skipping the Rumours panel. AI scouting interest in your drivers is published there before the mid-season poaching pass acts on it.
Expecting last season’s headlines. The feed holds one season and is pruned at the rollover.
Clicking a driver name for their contract terms. The profile shows the record and traits; contract terms live in My Team.
Confusing TECH stories about your own team with a delivery notice. Your own deliveries arrive as mail with an action marker; the News line is just the public announcement.