Team Principal: A Racing Manager · published
Hello all! Wanted to drop my patch notes a little early this time. I anticipate this update will be live on steam either tomorrow, or Friday evening! I am working at pace to get everything wrapped up and ready to ship. This game has seen some very strong growth recently, so apologies if I am not keeping up with everything as well as I usually am! I thank you guys for the continued support, and please, as always, do not hesitate to provide suggestions or ask questions. As some of the longer term players know, I am willing and open to almost ANY idea (just takes time to actually implement). This is meant to be one hell of a sandbox, and it wouldnt be complete without all of your ideas!
Replaced the old Personnel Negotiation Points system with a centralized, dynamic negotiation ledger for Formula and Oval, complete with stages of negotiations: approach, talks opening, offer submission, contested decisions between you and AI teams, acceptance, failure, cancellation, and cooldown.
Added the seasons a driver is signed for in the email header for clarity when reviewing AI signings. Added more detailed AI contract-debug emails showing personnel type, role, contract start, length, salary, bonuses, total value, and interest score.
In addition, to simulate the dynamics of a real life driver market, drivers can at times approach you with contract proposals with persisted, pre-agreed offers and accept, decline, and market-review options.
Added realistic veteran-contract term weighting for AI offers, applying only from the configured retirement-escalation age onward. This means AI teams tend to sign older drivers for shorter terms to limit their risk.
Added nationality-weighted regeneration for drivers and staff, and added nationality-appropriate first-name and surname pools for all supported nationalities.
Added persistent IDs to regenerated drivers and staff (this will help with rare cases of teams sometimes having 2 of the same personnel in different roles).
Randomized regenerated drivers’ driving-style preferences instead of assigning everyone neutral/default preferences.
COMPLETELY tore down and rebuild headquarters screen, complete with artwork of facilities as they level up and become larger. This is a significant UI overhaul, and it looks completely different.
Added over-time timed HQ construction for Formula and Oval:
20% upfront payment, with remainder of cost spread out over construction time for buildings.
Completely overhauled ERS deployment. Upgraded ERS systems will deploy more over a lap, while preserving the intended battery-recovery targets and mode behavior. Each ERS upgrade is now valuable, and very realistic.
VIRTUAL SAFETY CARS! Complete with a new regulation regarding safety car policy.
Added a Formula “Pit Now” command:
Tyre-selection confirmation popup.
Immediate next-opportunity pit request.
Cancellable before pit entry.
Automatic synchronization with the driver’s displayed strategy after the stop.
Added 300+ driver radio messages for both Practice and Race sessions. This includes: setup balance, traction, tyre pressure, acclimatization and setup satisfaction, overtakes, being overtaken, failed attacks, contact, spins, lockups, damage, tyre condition, pit instructions, changing weather, caution periods, specific rivalry radios, and last-place sarcasm.
Added calm, normal, flair, angry, apologetic, and enthusiastic radio wording based on driver personality and emotional state.
Added direct numeric typing for laps and fuel in Practice, Preseason Testing, and Private Testing stint planners. No more spamming to fuel for long stints.
Strategy UI tracks your actual tyre wear and adapts the graphs.
Added up to 4K resolution support!!!!!! UI rendering from 1080p through 1440p and 4K for crisp viewing on large screens.
Added support for different windowed modes and full-screen modes, more in line with regular modern games lol
Added an exact 1980×1080 UI display option for pixel-perfect presentation on supported monitors. The regular sizing can cause issues with HDR, if you are seeing darkness on your monitor, switch to 1080p (Exact).
Added a hard-coded, non moddable 0.0000001% chance your car randomly blows up mid-race, with all parts destroyed and needing to be rebuilt after.
Added a shared UI theme and reusable widgets across ALL Formula and Oval screens.
Modernized the driver, staff, supplier, sponsor, stock, and Oval market interfaces.
Added whole-row hover interaction and left/right-click profile access on driver market.
Added segmented /20 rating bars to personnel negotiation/profile views.
Added team-branded competition chips to negotiation information.
Added scrollable negotiation summaries on the dashboard.
Added read-only driver profiles in spectator mode, including history, statistics, traits, and relationships.
Added team and engine logos, engine colors, and bold text to Practice, Qualifying, and Race speed traps.
Modernized the Week 1 season-transition driver-rating email into a sortable table with:
Driver name.
Nationality.
Team coloring.
Previous overall.
Current overall.
Rating change.
COMPLETELY TORE DOWN AND REBUILT the Regulations screen with dedicated regulation artwork, categorized catalogues, current/next-rule details, option summaries, and specialized presentations for different regulation types.
Added an Estimated Pace view to the Performance screen with team, engine, car package, ERS, external parts, and overall pace comparisons. This will be used a lot for modders I anticipate.
Added detailed car-package benchmarking to the Car Overview.
Added a dashboard information tooltip identifying the areas responsible for a team’s pace deficit.
Added active-team presentation support so reactivated and future teams appear in Team Lineup, Contracts Centre, and new-season Team Select screens.
Updated team-selection driver ratings to consider only full-time race drivers, excluding reserves.
Added clickable, typable, searchable, and arrow-navigable nationality controls throughout Formula and Oval roster/save editors and track tracers.
Removed final-frame 1080p upscaling for migrated native screens, making text and UI elements crisp at larger resolutions.
Added fastest sector times on the qualifying results screen, and the fastest lap on the race results screen, when interactive races are used.
Added “Create Tyre Supplier” functionality to the Formula roster editor.
Created the Oval roster editor
Created the Oval save editor
Reduced AI setup preparation time by approximately 4–8× in tested conditions.
Reduced the long week 1 to week 2 load times dramatically
Removed redundant setup recalculation between Practice and Qualifying when track and weather conditions remain compatible, reducing load times.
Added dynamic ERS deployment windows while preserving the intended battery-recovery targets and mode behavior.
Parallelized independent physics-profile construction in races, which result in roughly 40% quicker speed at 5x, trailing to around 20% quicker by the end of the race.
Reduced a lot of the "clunkiness" in the menu as the game progresses. Optimization remains to be a work in progress, but it is significantly better.
New entrants receive eligible technical staff roles, plus a Head of Engine when operating an engine plant.
Reduced tested quick-sim peak memory from roughly 2 GB RAM usage to about 1 GB and interactive-race peaks from roughly 1.4 GB to about 0.6 GB.
Reduced allocator retention and repeated-race memory accumulation without changing physics precision or results. You should see reduced RAM usage.
Fixed intermittent permanent blue-flag deadlocks where traffic-limited speed prevented a lapped car from recognizing a following leader.
Fixed premature cancellation of blue flags caused by temporary corner-speed differences.
Coordinated leader and backmarker passing corridors to prevent both cars selecting the same lane.
Fixed safety-car pit-stop ordering that systematically reversed the field when many cars stopped together.
Safety-car pit exits now use exact entry time plus service duration, with deterministic tie-breaking to prevent backmarkers from jumping leaders under SC.
Fixed Safety Car deployment so it waits at start/finish and picks up the classified leader instead of appearing directly ahead of P1.
Fixed genuine overtaking continuing before cars had joined the Safety Car train.
Applied the caution order lock immediately at deployment, including lapped cars.
Continued allowing position changes caused by pits, retirements, spins, stalls, or immobilization.
Fixed Formula race starts and future strategies selecting tyre compounds without considering the actual physical sets available.
Prevented AI from selecting heavily worn starts when materially healthier legal alternatives exist.
Prevented strategies from scheduling more physical sets than remain.
Increased the global acceleration ceiling so ERS output no longer plateaued prematurely at power level 5 and beyond.
Fixed duplicate personnel names colliding in negotiation records.
Fixed negotiation annoyance and attempt counts persisting indefinitely across seasons. Attempts and annoyance now reset at Week 1 the following season for both player and AI negotiations.
Corrected the UI/text mismatch that described a 75% annoyance penalty when the calculation used 50%.
Fixed AI teams literally NEVER signing a particular driver after ONE failed negotiation, even decades later.
Fixed malformed or metadata-only driver contracts becoming truthy “phantom contracts” after save loading, causing young drivers to disappear from the game.
Fixed display filtering that hid reactivated or future-active teams from several management screens.
Fixed reserve drivers incorrectly influencing team-selection driver strength rankings.
Fixed a Team Dashboard crash caused by the prestige tooltip.
Fixed Schedule sector previews showing incorrect KMs.
Fixed track nationality fields reverting to <code>International</code>, particularly in the Oval track tracer.
Fixed nationality fields that could only be changed with arrows and could not be typed or clicked normally.
Fixed Formula roster-editor main-series contract entry IDs reporting no entries for selected teams.
Fixed accidental vertical viewport scrolling while dragging negotiation sliders or editor cards.
Fixed market stat labels and bars overlapping.
Fixed negotiation text wrapping and clipped long profile descriptions.
Fixed undersized dashboard and session logos at resolutions above 1080p.
Fixed large-grid Performance table clipping and scrollbar placement.
Fixed spectator mode preventing users from opening driver histories and relationships while maintaining complete read-only restrictions.
Added complete junior series program, with the unique ability to purchase, run, and sell junior series entries.
Thank you guys! Im so excited to release this build. This is a big step into what I would consider, the beginning polishings of a future polished game. ːsteamhappyː
- Patrick/Cookie