Patch v0.98.5 (Major Update)

Update v0.98.5 Patch Notes

This update focuses on making drivers, cars, and race incidents feel more personal, more dynamic, and more interconnected. Driver relationships now influence negotiations and on-track behavior, car setup now interacts with driver preferences, collisions have more varied outcomes, and several long-standing development, warehouse, statistics, and UI issues have been cleaned up.

Major New Features

Driver & Team Relationships

Drivers now have evolving relationships with other drivers and teams. Relationships can create rivalries, friendships, loyalty, jealousy, and tension, with long-term consequences across the save. These relationships now influence both the sporting side of the game and the contract market. Driver relationships can affect:

• Crash frequency

• Willingness to join or renew with a team

• Interest in driving alongside certain teammates

• Refusal to accept second-driver status

• Salary flexibility

• Prestige requirements

• Loyalty to current teams

• Reaction to team orders, collisions, reliability failures, wins, podiums, championships, and tenure

Relationship data is now shown in the personnel centre, negotiation screens, and roster editor, including flags, team colors, sorting, and sparse relationship editing support within the roster editor for players & modders. Negotiation screens have also been touched up a bit for this update to encompass the new changes.

Driving Style System Drivers now each have different balance and traction preferences, while cars derive balance and traction from chassis concept and setup choices. Driving style now affects performance across practice, qualifying, and races:

• Balance mismatch reduces cornering speed

• Traction mismatch increases spin risk

• Traction mismatch also increases tyre wear

Setup screens now show live balance and traction bars, including driver preference markers, so players can tune the car around each driver’s style, whilst trying to find the fastest setup overall. Both players and AI now have to find that balance between driver comfort and car performance. Driver negotiation and personnel centre screens now display each driver’s balance and traction preferences.

Expanded Collision System

Collisions now have a much wider range of outcomes instead of always forcing both cars to retire. Possible outcomes now include:

• Double retirements

• Single-car retirements

• Minor contact

• Spin contact

• Front wing damage

Collisions can now occur in practice and qualifying at reduced probability, with reduced relationship and morale impact. Rivalries and friendships can also influence collision probability, with rivals more likely to clash and friendly drivers less likely to make contact.

Front Wing Damage & Replacement

Contact can now damage front wings, slowing the car until repairs are made. Front wing damage has four severity levels:

• Minor

• Moderate

• Severe

• Destroyed

Each severity level applies a larger cornering-speed penalty. Players and AI teams can now replace damaged front wings at pit stops from the setup UI, using available warehouse stock. AI teams will also account for wing damage when deciding whether to pit, including late-race stay-out logic and safety car opportunities. Destroyed front wings are now properly removed and shown as unusable warehouse parts after races.

Classified Retirements - Cars that retire after completing at least 90% race distance can now still be classified. Classified retired cars:

• Keep position based on laps completed

• Can score points if eligible

• Display laps-down gaps correctly instead of total race time

Wet-Track DRS Control

DRS now automatically disables when track wetness rises above the configured threshold and re-enables when the track dries. Race control logs these messages in the event log.

Setup & Track Information Improvements

Setup screens now include a track characteristics popup, helping players understand the current circuit profile while tuning the car. The car setup screen also now displays live balance and traction values, updating as setup choices change.

Roster Editor Improvements

The roster editor now supports more advanced editing and comparison tools. New roster editor support includes:

• Creating engine suppliers directly from the editor

• Editing collision outcome weights and settings

• Comparing pecking order by overall performance or individual performance attributes for teams (this is my favorite lol)

• Editing driver/team relationship data

• Improved sponsor amount bracket layout

• Preserved starting sponsor contract lengths instead of resetting them to 3 years

Bug Fixes

Contracts, Negotiations & Sponsors

• Fixed sponsor same-industry penalties applying against current-season sponsors when negotiating next-season deals.

• Fixed engine partnership and free-supply logic so free engine supply only applies to eligible teams.

• Fixed engine stats resetting or changing after save reload.

• Fixed starting sponsor editor behavior resetting sponsor contracts to 3 years.

• Fixed overly large driver and staff performance bonuses causing extreme financial exposure.

• Fixed AI financial projections ignoring expected driver/staff performance bonus costs.

Drivers, Relationships & Statistics

• Fixed junior-series results being counted in main-series driver statistics.

• Fixed hidden driver talents leaking into academy and driver centre screens without a level 5 driver centre.

• Fixed roster editor driver traits being glitchy and allowing duplicate trait selection.

• Removed temporary realistic-relationship generation tooling.

• Fixed relationship UI headers, sorting, flags, team colors, long text overflow, and editor overlap issues.

• Fixed driver negotiation career-history scrolling and scrollbar placement.

Qualifying, Race Entry & Classification

• Fixed qualifying DNQ behavior where drivers with no qualifying participation could still be placed into the race.

• Fixed AI/player weekend car preparation using contractual main drivers instead of actual entered drivers.

• Fixed final-lap incident ordering so cars already across the finish line cannot retire before classification.

• Fixed classified retired cars displaying total time instead of laps-down gaps.

Parts, Warehouse & Front Wings

• Fixed race cars and parts disappearing from the warehouse UI when drivers were injured, expired, or replaced.

• Fixed stranded parts and engines not being recoverable when entrants changed.

• Fixed false DNS and long-term reliability issues caused by stranded equipment.

Chassis Development & Car Data

• Fixed AI aero projects being blocked by requiring full lifetime cost upfront instead of immediate/near-term affordability.

• Fixed preseason chassis bonuses not being applied canonically to fitted/current chassis baselines.

• Fixed preseason bonuses not matching physical chassis values.

• Fixed future chassis development affecting active current-season live chassis stats before the chassis was fitted.

• Fixed shallow chassis effect copies causing shared nested metadata/effect consistency issues.

• Fixed fitted-car rating caps using unrelated or future chassis potential instead of the fitted chassis design’s potential.

• Fixed current/future chassis UI and reporting inconsistencies around projected reliability and baseline values.

• Fixed chassis concept phase progress resetting when staff allocation changed.

• Fixed chassis prototype phase progress bar disappearing after staff reallocation.

• Fixed practice/session chassis condition UI showing a different percentage than the detailed condition popup.

UI & Editor Fixes

• Fixed engine market vertical scrolling when too many suppliers are present.

• Fixed team select screen lacking scrolling when too many teams exist.

• Fixed statistics season review scrollbars overlapping logos.

• Fixed sponsor amount bracket UI layout and readability.

• Fixed relationship UI overlap and long-text readability issues.

• Fixed debug/test cleanup before release, including unused pytest files and noisy debug prints.

Balance Changes

Performance Bonus Rebalance

• Driver performance bonus ranges have been reduced significantly. Staff performance bonus ranges have been reduced even further than driver bonuses.

• AI teams now budget for expected performance bonuses based on recent results, reducing surprise financial exposure. This is what was causing large AI teams to go bust, and have been fixed.

Informational Relationships now influence both racing and negotiations. Relationship effects include:

• Rivalry-based collision probability increases

• Friendly-driver collision probability reductions

• Teammate preference modifiers

• Renewal willingness changes

• Second-driver refusal logic

• Team loyalty modifiers

• Prestige requirement changes

• Salary flexibility changes

Relationships now evolve from:

• Collisions

• Team orders

• Private testing requests

• Driver status clarity

• Team performance

• Wins

• Podiums

• Championships

• Driver/team tenure

• Reliability failures

• Championship fights

Driving Style Balance

Driving style mismatch now affects real performance:

• Balance mismatch reduces cornering speed

• Traction mismatch increases spin risk

• Traction mismatch increases tyre wear