Major update
Update 0.4.0 — Scouting, Driver Traits, Driver Academy & a Talking Tutorial
The Undercut: Racing Manager · published
Update 0.4.0 — Scouting, Driver Traits, Driver Academy & a Talking Tutorial
The biggest update since The Undercut began. The driver market is now a real game system. Money management matters. Every driver, team and circuit has a profile page. And the entire game is voice-guided for new players.
The free demo is updated with everything below.
⭐ Driver Scouting — The Headline
Driver stats are no longer public. Everyone starts partially hidden.
- New Scouting department — your 8th infrastructure. Its level sets your scouting capacity per GP.
- The Drivers app is now the Scouting Center: reveal-as-you-scout columns, favorites, contract-aware badges, and salary estimates that sharpen as your knowledge grows.
- Missions tab — track your running observations, reallocate or stop them, and review your scouting history.
- What you learn is never unlearned — and AI teams scout too, feeding the paddock rumour mill all season.
Scout before you sign. A cheap driver with red traits is no bargain.
🎭 Driver Traits
Drivers now carry hidden personality and skill traits — late brakers, tyre whisperers, hot heads, prodigies, toxic teammates. Each trait has real effects:
- On-track: braking, cornering, tyre wear, pressure resistance, mistakes
- Off-track: fame, teammate morale, team chemistry
- Traits range from negative (yellow → red) to positive (green → blue → purple)
🎓 Driver Academy
Build the new Driver Academy — your 9th infrastructure department. Grow your own talent:
- Junior slots (16–18) and development slots (18–21)
- Prospects develop like signed drivers and can be promoted to your race team cheaply
👤 Profile Pages for Everything
- Driver Profile — identity, scouting-gated attributes, traits, contract, full career record
- Team Profile — honours, prestige, infrastructure, car ranking, sponsors, suppliers, per-season history
- Circuit Profile — track map, key facts, race history, lap record, contracts
- Every name in the game is clickable — from News, Standings, Calendar, Mail, anywhere
🎙️ A Tutorial That Talks
- Completely reworked onboarding with step-by-step guided phases
- Full voice-over — every tutorial card is read aloud
- Win95 hover tooltips everywhere — every stat, column, badge and bar explains itself on mouse-over
💰 Economy & AI Overhaul
- Team value, equity sales & bank loans — sell shares to survive (game over below 50% ownership) or take a bank loan
- AI teams run balanced / aggressive / conservative financial models — they save when struggling, sign pay drivers when broke, downgrade facilities in a crisis
- TV broadcast rights paid each pre-season
- Championship prize pool doubled
- Team bankruptcies announced in the News
📝 Contracts & Market
- Contracts honoured to term — no more silent early departures
- Driver ambition and objectives — missing them costs happiness and can push a star to the exit
- Mid-season signing window at GP 10
- Driver retirements keep the talent pool fresh across seasons
🔧 Car & R&D
- Car and R&D merged into one app — cleaner workflow
- Design projects sized freely with a continuous slider
- Production tab — manufacture parts from blueprints, rush for +50%
- Regulation pressure — miss a mandatory redesign and you start on rushed "Poor" parts
📰 News App
A proper media dashboard: clickable headlines with team logos, latest results, in-focus stories, and paddock rumours. The sport feels alive around you.
🛠️ Performance
- Fixed a massive GPU memory leak
- Saves no longer freeze the game (async save — fixes the 10–20s Windows hitch)
- Windows: resizable window from launch
Try It
This is the version we've been building toward. The demo is updated — if you tried it before and wanted more depth, this is the build to come back to.
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