The Undercut: Racing Manager · published
The last patch before Early Access on September 3. No new systems — just making sure the ones you have don't lie to you, crash on you, or quietly charge the wrong car for someone else's damage.
The calendar is no longer a static list. Circuits now belong to a pool and hold contracts with the series — they join, they renew, they expire. A track that loses its deal drops off the calendar. A new venue with the right economics and media interest takes its slot. Your season-to-season calendar shifts the way real motorsport calendars do. Careers started before 0.5.1 gain the circuit pool and series contracts on load — nothing lost, everything additive.
Spinning into a wall used to run the full crash damage pipeline. A spin's wall brush now only damages parts on a rare roll. The dent, the lost position, the tyre wear and the shaken confidence still land — but your car no longer needs a full rebuild because a rear tyre stepped out at turn 4. Crashes keep their full consequences. A lost wheel now correctly reads as heavy suspension damage instead of a three-wheeled car with pristine parts and no explanation.
Careers, replays, screenshots and settings now sit in each platform's standard user directory — %APPDATA% on Windows, ~/Library on Mac, $XDG_DATA_HOME on Linux. This means Steam Cloud can sync them properly, and a reinstall won't silently delete your 40-hour career. Existing installs migrate automatically on first launch. Drop a portable.txt next to the executable if you prefer everything in the game folder.
A dozen screens had no controller bindings for what they actually do. Now they do:
Infrastructure: right stick to browse departments, triggers to buy and sell
Start button ends the turn from any app
Country filter opens the on-screen keyboard with Select
Sponsor rows no longer open negotiations just because you scrolled past them
Every binding is stamped on its button and echoed in the hint bar from a single source — they cannot drift apart
These are the kind of bugs that make you question your own strategy — because the game was quietly doing something else entirely.
A wrecked car kept racing. A stranded car raised the safety car while the standings still showed it running. Fixed — a wreck is a wreck.
Your #2 driver destroyed his brakes every weekend. He was running an AI team's practice programme. A reserve driver on the roster shifted the plan assignment list by one — your car got a 26-lap AI push programme instead of your 14-lap plan. That 1.9× distance ratio explains the 8.6% brake health.
The fuel slider did nothing. The run plan showed one fuel figure, then silently handed the race a different one. Fixed — what the slider shows is what the car carries.
Leaving a GP and coming back changed the race distance. 45 laps instead of 29 on a long circuit. Fixed.
Quitting always crashed. Closing the window ran no shutdown code — a save still being written was lost, and the process died of a segfault. Fixed — clean shutdown, reliable save.
Damage charged to the wrong car. Four places in the code determined which car a driver was in, and they disagreed when a reserve was on the roster. A driver is now bound to a car.
The driver offer popup gave away scouted stats for free. True stats instead of your estimates — on the one screen where that information costs money. Estimates now.
A missing config key could silently switch your engine. Older installs fell back to a legacy renderer with invisible mesh deformation and silent wheel loss. Fixed with tests that pin the shipped experience.
Mid-season drivers scored nothing. A promoted reserve or mid-season signing showed 0 wins / 0 podiums in the standings. The season log now grows to fit whoever takes a start.
Academy quoted the wrong price. 500k advertised for a department that charges 4M.
Pre-season development exploit closed.
"Body" is now "Bodywork" — what this part models is sidepods, engine cover, coke-bottle — not the monocoque
Settings and PFS Series have their own icons instead of borrowing someone else's
Existing careers keep working — every change is additive
Play the Updated Demo · Wishlist — September 3 · Join Discord See you on the grid. 🏁