Update 0.5.4-5 — Tyres, Fuel, and an AI balances and fixes
The Undercut: Racing Manager · published
Update 0.5.4-5
Two weeks of your bug reports, save files and Discord screenshots turned into the biggest balance pass since launch. The headline: your tyres were running permanently overheated, and your fuel load barely mattered. Both are fixed, and the field should spread out properly from here. There is also an Easy difficulty preset now — several of you told me the first season was a wall. It is built into the game, it follows every balance update, and it is one click away.
Balancing will continue in future updates.
The Car Underneath
Tyres ran too hot. On every player build, permanently in the red — costing grip and doubling wear. They now reach their working window.
Fuel load had almost no effect on lap times. 80 kg was worth 0.4 s a lap; the corner-speed margin ignored the car's performance and fuel never weighed on acceleration. 80 kg now costs roughly 2.6 s a lap (about 0.3 s per 10 kg), and Pace 1 to 20 is worth about 1.1 s. Two new Simulation sliders: Fuel Mass → Accel, Car Dry Mass.
Tyre compounds are further apart. A fresh Soft is now about 0.9 s a lap quicker than a fresh Hard on a typical circuit, where it used to be under 0.5 s — closer to the 1990s gap. It still wears 1.43× faster. New Simulation slider: Compound Pace Gap.
Consistency rebalanced. A 20/20 driver was a robot at 0.07 s of lap-to-lap scatter. He now sits around 0.13 s, and a 1/20 driver around 0.5 s.
A hidden speed ceiling is gone. Car performance above 150 points did almost nothing, and a car at the top of the scale stopped feeling its driver, its compound and half its fuel. Removed. New Simulation slider: Part Performance → Speed.
Fixed: a practice or qualifying car that ran out of fuel kept lapping at full pace on an empty tank. It now comes back to the pits.
Race Strategy — the AI Rewritten
The AI used to run the same strategy every weekend and then throw it away at the worst possible moment. That whole layer has been rebuilt.
AI teams now plan on their full estimated race time, with a dose of judgement error. The same cars no longer converge on the same plan every race, and bolder teams commit to offset strategies. A stop happens on its planned lap, pulled forward by a few laps at most, and tyres are planned further from the limit.
Safety Car pit strategy fixed and rebalanced.
No more pointless stops near the finish. A car whose tyres and fuel reach the flag skips its planned stop and says so. A worn set is nursed home on lift and coast instead of a late tyre change. A car a few laps short on fuel lifts and coasts rather than pitting on the last laps. The leader no longer pits with two laps to go on two laps of fuel, nobody stops on the final lap with a lap of fuel in the tank, and lapped cars no longer pit at the chequered flag — every car now counts the laps to its flag, which is the leader's. Misjudging the fuel still happens: the burn is measured, not known. Running dry on the last lap included.
Engine map and lift and coast now affect tyre wear. An AI driver whose tyres will not last to the next stop turns the map down and starts saving the moment the projection says so. Inside the last five laps he drives a marginal set home rather than diving into the pits. A car whose plan still contains a stop no longer starts saving for the finish long before it.
In Simulate, your car holds your run plan. No undercut, no early stop on the AI's initiative. Only a Safety Car, a genuine tyre re-plan or an emergency can move a stop, and each one explains itself in the new Driver Feedback strip — every stop of the race, your cars only. It is close to a debug readout for now and will be cleaned up.
Difficulty and Sliders
Difficulty presets.Easy and Very Easy are now on the Simulation and Career preset pages, built into the game — they follow every balance update and cannot be deleted. More money and faster development, more forgiving partners and rivals, fewer mistakes, failures and start incidents.
Slider presets. The Simulation and Career tabs open on a Presets page. Save your sliders as named presets and choose which one each career plays with, including from the in-career Settings. Default is the balance the game ships with and follows every update; a preset of your own is never overwritten by a patch. Reset Tab returns to the shipped balance, and presets can be renamed.
Export and import. A preset exports as a JSON file and imports from the presets folder, so you can share a ruleset.
Type a slider value. Click a value to type it exactly; Enter applies it and the bar follows. The slider tables are now striped and grouped, searchable, and every slider has hover help.
Career
No new supplier ever joined. Ten seasons could pass without a single new engine, tyre or fuel brand. New suppliers now join regularly — roughly one every four years per category at minimum, more when a category runs short — with a news line and a mail from your commercial department. Two new Career sliders: Supplier Arrival Chance, Max Gap.
Suppliers also leave for real reasons. A brand nobody runs tends to go, an unhappy single-client brand may follow, and a brand whose client leads the championship never withdraws at the top of its form. Every running contract is honoured to its end. Two more Career sliders: Supplier Leave Chance, no client.
Fixed: from the second season onward, the Engineering work-unit budget was not refilled for the pre-season — Development started on whatever was left after the last race. Every season now opens with a full pool, and the engine-delivery mail tells you how much.
AI drivers can be injured or fall ill like yours, on the same odds and the same recovery times. Their team puts its reserve in the car, or signs one if it has none, and the driver returns once passed fit. Medical and transfer news follow.
Pit Wall and Interface
Delta Best went blank after your first hot lap, and again after a return to the pits between two stints, until the second flying lap of the next stint. It now always compares to your best of the session.
A lap with a pit exit read ahead of your personal best. The pit lane has no timing lines and the delta was rebuilt from stale splits. A stop now reads behind, as it should.
The post-race debrief was cut off at the bottom at larger UI scales. It scrolls now, like the other full-page screens.
Race Strategy screen. The Practice Data panel no longer overflows, it shows the estimated cost of each pit stop (lane plus service) and the plan's estimated race time, and the chart's PIT markers show the lap. Changing the plan updates the starting fuel from that plan's own first stint.
The run plan uses your race sim. Strategies now build on your Race Sim laps, per car and per compound, borrowing the other car's race sim for a compound it did not run. Without a race sim the sheet tells you the figures come from a qualifying sim and may be wrong. In live practice, launching your quali sim before your race sim no longer makes the race-sim figures vanish.
Fixed: the Circuit Editor toolbar showed rectangles instead of "-" and "…", and the Settings → Presets descriptions ran under the Use and Export buttons.
Modding and Circuits
Grids of up to 20 teams, from a mod pack (its team list races, up to the cap) or from the Custom career setup with a slider from 8 to 20. The pit lane sizes its boxes to the grid.
Custom tracks in Settings. Settings → Career → Circuit pool → Custom… lets you pick .circuit files from your mods and the Steam Workshop, set the world-pool size from 24 to 70, and choose whether the rest is filled with hand-curated or procedural circuits. Your circuits take the calendar rounds first, and each one can be pinned to a round from 1 to 20 with a click on its round box — it then races on that round with a random contract. The next new career uses it.
Fixed: track packs were being replaced by procedural tracks. A pack whose circuits were all "pool" venues with no calendar raced a generated season, and its venues later hosted generated tracks under their own names. A pack's drawn circuits now take the season's rounds and are raced as drawn, on the calendar and at every later review. A hand-drawn circuit promoted from the pool by the GP-15 review also raced a generated track instead of its layout — fixed.
Circuit Editor: import a race track.Load… reopens a saved .circuit file from mods/circuits/ to keep working on it, with its markers, properties and calendar placement.
Circuit Editor: draw over a reference.Ref img… shows any picture from your disk under the canvas as a reference, without tracing it. Load…, Import img… and Ref img… all open your system's own file dialog on Windows, macOS and Linux.
Added: a drawn circuit saved without a country or city now gets one from the world, always the same for that circuit, so it has a flag and a proper Grand Prix name. A country written as a code ("ES") is read as its name, on new and existing careers.
Fixed: Mod Editor could not author a driver older than 40. The growth chart on the driver form failed past that age and took the form down with it. (In game, a driver from 38 has a 40% chance each season of retiring, so a 45-year-old is a short career by design.)
Lower driver ages from mods. Packs may create prospects under 16, down to 1 year old. They grow up season by season, appear in Scouting from 14, and can only race or sign where the series' age rules allow — 18 for the PFS.
Mod Editor: a supplier can back several teams, each as a Partner (the supplier pays the team, one partner per supplier) or a Customer (the team pays). One supplier per category per team: the picker blocks a second and the Audit tab flags it.
Fixed: the Mod Editor country list stopped around Poland — only the first 80 countries were listed.
Languages
Russian and every Cyrillic language pack showed rectangles instead of letters — the game's fonts had no Cyrillic at all. The interface and the race HUD now switch to a font that covers it whenever such a language is selected, and switch back when it is not.
Polish characters, and any accented Latin letters the menu font was missing (Czech, Turkish and others), showed rectangles on the main menu. The game now checks every font against the letters the selected language actually uses, swaps in a covering font where needed, and re-checks when you change language.
Thank You
The tyre temperature bug and the fuel weight bug were both found by players, not by me. Keep the reports coming: the in-game bug report or the Discord. A save file attached to a report is worth ten descriptions. Next up is 0.5.5: Custom Career settings, per-department automation, spectator mode and another AI balance pass. See you on the pit wall. The Undercut: Racing Manager · Join the Discord