The Pit Wall guide: how the game works.

A racing management game in pixel art. You are the pit wall: you choose the team, the drivers, the setup, the tyres and the moment of the stop. You never drive.

The race runs on its own and you watch most of it. Your job is deciding when to step in, and leaving the car out is as much a call as bringing it in.

MENU → create your team → HUB
                        ↓
          race weekend (repeats 12 times)
                        ↓
      track briefing → qualifying → strategy → race → post-race
                        ↓
             season end → new season

The hub is your base between weekends. From there you run car development, driver training, the standings and the staff market, then leave for the next race.

What you actually decide:

What you don't control. Talent shifts with age on its own, rising while a driver is young and slipping later, and you can't touch it. The weather does what it wants. A development project can fail. The rival teams run a pit wall that thinks the way yours does, and it won't wait for your mistake.

Two modes. Career is the full game: whole seasons, money, development, standings, titles. Quick race is a single race with any team and drivers, no tokens and nothing at stake, there to try the simulation.

Language and platforms. Italian and English, following the system language. It runs on iPhone, iPad and Mac, in landscape; hold the device upright and the game asks you to turn it.

The first choice is difficulty, and it decides two things: how good your car is, and where the rest of the grid sits relative to you.

On Hard you feel the slower car every weekend, and the rival pit wall is sharper too: it rethinks its strategy more often and misjudges less. That last part matters little next to the car itself, but it decides close finishes.

The crest and the name. You always choose the crest from the full set. It sets the team's colours and name and nothing else, so picking the look you want never costs you anything on track. The name comes filled in with the crest's default; keep it or write your own. It is the only text you type in the whole game and it stays for the career. Quick race keeps the default teams and names.

The wage bill. In the draft you don't pay a fee for a driver, you take on a wage that comes due every race. The cap is how much wage you can carry in total. Two star drivers fit under it, but they leave you a weak pit wall and no room to spare; two solid drivers and a good engineer cost less than that pair alone. Whatever you leave uncommitted comes back to you and then stops draining every race, which is how you fund development.

Running dry. If you run out of tokens the championship keeps you going, but the sponsor takes your end-of-season prize even if you met its target. Going over the wage cap has a price.

The draft. It buys two drivers, a design chief and a track engineer. There is always a wildcard in the driver pool: a rookie with hidden stats, cheap, who turns out to be either a find or a passenger, and you only learn which once they race. Skip them and a rival signs them.

Sponsors. A title sponsor and a technical one. The title sponsor pays most of the money and sets a season target. The technical one pays less and adds something else: tokens each race, a morale lift, or better reliability.

The season. Twelve races on twelve circuits, and the calendar order is reshuffled every year, so no two seasons feel the same. Twelve rather than ten because a development project ties up a race, so the calendar also caps how much you can build in a year. The extra races are two more projects and two more sets of wages, which sting if you spent big on drivers and barely register if you didn't. Every track has its own character: outright speed, tyre wear, the chance of a mistake, the odds of rain, the time a stop costs. A street circuit punishes every pit visit; a fast one rewards engine and slipstream. Points go to the top ten. Two tables, drivers and constructors; the constructors' one is yours, and the one your title sponsor watches.

The title fight. With a few races to go and two or three drivers clear at the top, the title fight turns on. Those drivers get a marker by their name, race harder when a rival is close on track, and gain morale every weekend. In a race that can settle the title, the pressure is on everyone, wherever they sit.

Season's end. The year closes with the constructors' prize, the title sponsor's bonus if you hit the target, and the titles. The reigning champion stays named above the standings all through the next season, with a star for each career title. Then everything resets: calendar reshuffled, points cleared, development budget full, drivers back to full morale. The team that won is still ahead, but by less, because the rivals spent the winter working.

The Monday paper. Between the post-race screen and the hub, a front page sums up the weekend: the headline result, the podium, pole, the weather, retirements, the fastest lap, the move of the race, where you stand and where you go next. It replaces the standings screen that used to open on its own, and the full table is still a tap away. The tone shifts as the year goes on, from «the standings are taking shape» in spring to «the title changes hands» in autumn. A one-two or a double podium leads as team news, ahead of anything about a single driver. When a title is decided, for you or anyone else, the page says so once, in the race where it happens.

The hub feed. A panel at the top of the hub keeps a running account: last Sunday, where you sit in both tables, what is at stake next time out. It changes every race, and the top line is always the biggest thing that happened, whether that is a driver's first career win, a podium, your best result of the year, a place gained in the constructors', or both cars out in one afternoon. It follows the rest of the grid too: who won when you didn't, when the title changes hands, a wet or attritional race, a real climb through the field by one of your drivers. Late in the year it turns to the run-in, and over winter to the driver market, then back to the racing when the season starts.

Saves. The career saves itself. You can only have one at a time, and starting another overwrites it, with a warning first.

Two per team, and half of what makes a result. A quick car with the wrong driver won't win, and the reverse is just as true.

One trait has no bar: how much a driver complains. A vocal one floods the radio with reports, and sorting the real ones from the noise is on you.

Morale. It rises when a driver beats what was expected of them and falls when they fall short, and what's expected depends on your car. Each team runs two cars, so a midfield team's drivers are expected to finish mid-pack: fifth in the fifth-best car is a normal day, fifth in the best car is a poor one, and a top-ten in the slowest car on the grid is a great one. Winning lifts morale, losing to a teammate stings, and the title fight keeps a driver up through the closing races. Everyone starts each season at full morale.

On form. A driver on form isn't the one who won last time out, it's the one stringing good Sundays together. A result up to the car's level starts the run, and each one after that adds a little more morale. A bad race or a retirement ends it: form takes months to build and an afternoon to lose. You can be on form without a single win, which is the usual way of it in a midfield car, and one win in a run of retirements doesn't count.

What morale buys. A little pace, though not enough to decide much on its own. And training points, which come faster the higher morale sits and dry up once it drops into the lower half of the range.

Training. Training points build up race by race and go into consistency, tyre management, wet skill or reactivity. Not talent, which is fixed. You can also buy one coaching session per weekend for a single driver.

Age and the career arc. Talent isn't a fixed number any more: it climbs into a driver's late twenties and starts to ease off in the thirties. The drop is gentle, a champion stays a champion, but a few seasons in you notice it. Experience keeps building the whole time; a veteran reads a race better and errs less, a young driver reacts quicker.

Turnover. At the end of each year a driver or two retires, never before the mid-thirties, and the quick ones hang on longer, so there are still drivers racing into their forties. A twenty-year-old rookie takes each vacated seat, never a recycled veteran, and now and then two drivers swap teams. Across ten seasons a good share of the grid turns over while its overall level holds. Your own drivers never retire on you: when one turns thirty-five the game tells you and leaves the decision with you. Whatever happened over the winter is waiting in the hub the first time you open the new season.

Dropping a driver. You can release a driver from the hub at any time. It costs a few tokens and brings in a wildcard: an unknown rookie, random stats, little experience. Points the departing driver scored leave with them and disappear from the drivers' table, though the team keeps its constructors' points. It's a move for a season already lost, or for a gamble. Nobody comes back later under a different face.

How the grid fills. At the start of a career the best drivers tend to land at the best teams, but not in a neat line. The market has some noise in it, a little talent ends up in the wrong seat, and every career opens on a different grid.

Two hires, two different jobs. Their rating matters, but the trait that stands out is what really changes your weekend.

Design chief. Works at the factory, not the track. A higher rating means development projects succeed more often and the test bench is less risky. Each chief specialises in one department, and projects there land more breakthroughs and fewer flaws; working outside it still works, just for less. With no design chief at all, projects still deliver, but far less.

Track engineer. The voice you hear during the race and at the setup bench. The rating sets how precise they are; the trait sets what they are best at.

A weak engineer won't mislead you, they just stay vague. A strong one gives you the exact change and the exact lap. The gap shows most in qualifying, where there's no time to work it out yourself.

The market. The staff market shifts between races on its own. You'll never see two candidates with the same rating and the same speciality, since they'd be the same person twice, but two specialists in one department at different ratings do turn up, and choosing between them is really a question of how much that department is worth to you. Hiring costs a one-off fee, roughly a race's wage, and the new hire replaces whoever holds the job, with no need to fire first. Every staff member draws a wage every race, alongside the drivers'. A top pit wall is paid all season, not just on the day you sign it.

Four stages: briefing, qualifying, strategy, race.

Briefing. The track card: lap count, a reference lap time, how hard the surface is on tyres, the chance of a mistake, the cost of a stop, the odds of rain, and a line or two from the pit wall on what matters here. It reads in a few seconds and shapes the rest of the weekend.

Qualifying. It runs in three timed parts, with the slowest five knocked out after each of the first two. You don't drive the lap. You choose when to send the car out, on which tyre, and how much risk to take, from a tidy lap to everything on the line. The rest is down to the driver, the setup and the traffic.

The setup. Four areas, aero, chassis, power unit and dynamics, each with a few notches. A right answer exists, it's different for each driver, and you never see it. Two voices help you look for it. The driver gives you a feeling: «it won't turn, I reach the corner and it runs wide». The more experienced and consistent they are, the sharper that is; a rookie often just points at a part of the track, and sometimes blames the wrong area for what they feel.

The engineer reads the data and tells you where the problem is, not what to do about it. How much they can pin down depends on their rating and on how many laps you've run: early on it's «one of these two areas», then the area itself, then which way the car is off, described in words first and named precisely only at the top level. How far to move a notch is always your call, which is what makes finding a setup a search. A strong engineer is precise from the first run; a middling one gets there by mid-session if you keep lapping. Running matters even when the time doesn't improve, because every lap gives the engineer more to work with.

When the driver and the engineer disagree, a conflict flag appears, and neither is automatically right. You can spend a few minutes of session on an extra analysis that settles one point: in a conflict it tells you who was right, otherwise it clears the murkiest area that matters here.

A lap wrecked by a yellow flag still counts for something: the time is gone, the data isn't, so the car learned from it. A red flag stops the session properly, with the clock frozen until the track is live again, and if there's then no time left for a proper lap the session is extended to make room. Qualifying shouldn't be decided by who didn't get to run.

When both your cars come back in, the session slows right down. This is when the times come through and you decide whether to send them out again, and it's meant to be read without rushing. It speeds back up on its own.

Nothing you learn is wasted: setup and knowledge carry through all three parts of qualifying, which is how a strong team can spend the first part learning rather than chasing a time. Some of it even carries between weekends, so a track you've raced before starts you closer to the answer. While a driver is on track the pit-wall panel shows only that they're out and what pace they're on, since tyres and setup can only change in the pits. Pace is worth watching mid-lap, and it's re-read every sector.

Tyre sets. You have a handful of sets of each compound, and a set is done once it has covered about ten laps; after that it's spent and can't go back on. Use up every set of a compound and you can't run it again. The button to send the car out flashes in the last minutes that still allow a full lap, and once that window shuts, sitting in the garage watching the clock does nothing for you.

Between the runs. Half an hour of qualifying isn't half an hour of action. A driver who has their time waits in the garage for the track to come to them, and the wait only pays while other cars are out there rubbering it in; if everyone parks, nothing improves, and a long red flag can cost you the exact thing you were waiting for. When the session goes quiet the pit wall tells you where things stand: who's on a hot lap, how many still have no time, how long is left, whether the weather is about to turn. For your own drivers you also see which sectors they've just improved, so you watch a lap build. Your cars carry a small coloured tag so you can find them while scrolling, and the two of them keep fixed places on screen, first driver on the left, second on the right, even when they swap in the order. The commentary runs unbroken across all three parts rather than restarting each time.

Before the race. You set the starting compound and roughly where the stops fall, for each driver. Above that sits the pit wall's read: what the track is like at the start, where the race is heading, and a lap-by-lap forecast strip that's solid for the first few laps and a question mark after. Past that horizon the pit wall only commits as far as it's worth committing.

Three presets, conservative through aggressive, differ in starting tyre and how hard each stint is pushed, and you can drag the stops around by hand from there. A graph underneath draws the expected wear, with a red band for the danger zone; a stint that ends inside it is a plan that won't hold. One stop is always required, since no tyre lasts the full race.

Choose a tyre from the wrong family for the water actually on the track and you get a gamble warning. Note what it's reading: water on the ground, not the sky. Light drizzle barely wets the surface, so a slick is still the right call, and starting on intermediates there is a real punt rather than caution.

The race itself. From here you watch. Your controls are each driver's pace, the call to pit, and the tyre you fit. Everything else is the simulation, and the pit wall on the radio.

Most races turn on tyres and weather, so this is the part to get straight first.

There are no hidden cut-offs. Each compound has a performance curve that moves with the water on track. A soft is untouchable on a dry surface and undriveable on a wet one; the intermediate has a narrow window and chews itself up outside it.

Water on the track, not in the sky. These are two separate things, and it's the distinction the game is built on. The sky moves between dry, drizzle, light rain and downpour. The track holds an amount of water that follows the sky slowly: it soaks fast and dries slowly, and cars running on the racing line help clear it.

Rain stops and the track stays wet for laps. Fit slicks a lap early and it's a disaster; a lap late still costs you. The point where a slick beats an intermediate again isn't written down anywhere, it comes out of the two curves crossing, and nobody calls it for you. The pit wall gives you hints and you make the decision.

Pace alone doesn't settle it. On a barely damp track a slick is a touch quicker but wears far faster, and after a dozen laps the car that started on intermediates is ahead. The question at the start isn't which tyre is fastest now, it's which one carries you furthest before you have to throw it away.

Rubber down. Cars lay rubber on the surface and everyone goes quicker on it; a worked-in track is worth close to a second a lap over how it ran that morning. Two things stay separate. How much rubber goes down depends on cars actually running, not on time passing: a full field pounding round lays it far faster than a couple of cars, a lap behind the Safety Car adds almost nothing, and a red-flag break adds none at all. Park everyone in the garage during qualifying and the track stops improving, so waiting only works while someone else is out there.

How much of that rubber you can use comes down to the water. Flooded, the racing line is still there but gives nothing back; as it dries the line pays off again, and most of the gain lands in the damp phase. That's the interesting moment of a wet race: a drying line over a track that's already rubbered in. The rain hid that work, it didn't erase it, and when the line comes good it returns all at once to whoever is on it. How much this matters depends on the circuit. A street track shows up green and transforms across the weekend; a permanent one starts half worked-in and has less to give. And the track doesn't reset between qualifying and the race: Sunday runs on what Saturday laid down.

How a tyre wears. A tyre's condition drops every lap, and how fast comes down to a few things:

• > the track, which matters most
• > the compound, a soft going far quicker than a hard
• > pace, where pushing costs more than it looks
• > the driver, a good manager stretching a stint a long way
• > a tyre out of its window, like an intermediate on a drying track, which destroys itself

A worn tyre is slower and more likely to catch you out, and past a point the stop stops being optional. You would normally run one down to not much life left; changing at half-worn throws away a good set, and the game never suggests it.

Cold tyres. A fresh set is new rubber but cold rubber, and those are different. For the out-lap it's slower, a little on softs and noticeably more on hards, then it comes up to temperature and the deficit is gone. Softs light up almost at once, mediums take a lap or so, hards take longer and struggle on a cold track, and wets and intermediates warm up fine as long as there's really water down. Pushing brings a set up to temperature quicker, but a cold tyre pushed hard is more likely to bite, so it's a short-term gamble that can just as easily cost you. Backing off does the reverse.

In the timing screen a car on cold tyres shows its compound greyed out, yours and everyone else's, and it returns to colour once the tyre is ready. Two moves come out of this. The undercut: stop early, bolt on softs and push straight away, and the fresh-tyre lap gets you out ahead. The overcut: stay out while a rival stops, and while they nurse cold hards up to temperature you put in one hard lap on an older but warm set.

The forecast. Before the race you get the weather strip, firm for the first few laps and a question mark after. The pit wall adds a read in words, steady, improving, rain coming, and how far it commits depends on your engineer. What's inside the strip is stated as certain; what's past the horizon is a guess, and a weaker engineer stays vague about it.

Read it carefully, because the pit wall gives you two separate laps: the one where the sky changes and the one where the tyres want changing. They're rarely the same. With plenty of water down and the sky clearing early, slicks might not come good until many laps later, and it's that second number that sets your stop.

During the race the pit wall flags when the track shifts phase, when a set hits crisis, and when the plan needs rethinking. With a tyre-reading engineer, once your two drivers have run a lap on different compounds you're told which is working better, with the lap times behind it.

The weather gamble is open to everyone: fitting the tyre that's wrong now but right in five laps. When a rival tries it the game says so, and a few laps on it tells you whether it worked.

Your three controls:

• > Pace: manage, normal or attack. Pushing finds time and spends tyres and luck; managing does the opposite. There's no correct setting, only the one that fits the moment.
• > The stop: yours to call, whenever you want, and the car comes in at the end of that lap.
• > The tyre: chosen when you make the stop.

One rule holds for the rival pit walls as much as for you: a tyre you nurse to the flag was never banked. If the set would have lasted anyway, or you're about to bin it for another, managing it protects nothing. What actually holds an attack back is having someone to chase; a long way clear, you settle down, because there's nothing to win and plenty to drop.

Passing costs. No overtake is free. Even after a quicker lap, you still have to take the place, the car ahead gets to defend, and if it holds you sit in its wake with the advantage gone. How dearly that defence costs depends on the track: a street circuit needs a big pace gap before a pass becomes inevitable, a fast one much less, which is why the track card tells you when qualifying well is worth half the weekend. The driver counts too, and so does tyre state, fresh against worn, warm against just-fitted. A healthy pace margin gets it done sooner, but sooner means over a few laps, not in one move. This is the same for you and the AI: rejoining in traffic on fresh tyres is a real edge, not a clear road to the front, and on some circuits the traffic eats half of what the stop gained.

What reaches you. The feed covers the race: passes, mistakes, weather, rival stops, your drivers on the radio. It isn't a full account of twenty cars, which would be unreadable, just what touches you or changes the race. Rival strategy calls are held to a tighter line: you hear about your own drivers and the cars around you, not someone half a minute back.

Tap one of your drivers for recent lap times, tyre state, and what a stop right now would do: time lost, where you'd rejoin, how long the new set would last. A strategy engineer makes those numbers tight, a weak one makes them a broad range. You can also watch a rival: their strategy from the outside, their recent laps, and your pit wall's rough guess at their tyres. For a car that's already retired there's nothing to estimate, so the panel just tells you how their race ended, with a remark the engineer wouldn't risk mid-race.

One thing the pit wall won't do is warn you that a rival is about to stop in the closing laps, because late on nobody does: a stop in the pit lane doesn't come back with a few laps left, and a tyre gets nursed home however far gone it is. If a projection lands there, the answer is «it makes the finish», not a stop window, and the same goes for projections on your own cars.

The rival pit walls. Each one runs its own maths, weighing stay out, stop now, run long or attack late, and takes whichever promises the best time. It doesn't cheat, it's on the same tyre physics you are, and it misjudges like a real pit wall would, more so with an inexperienced driver and less so on higher difficulty. On Hard it re-checks the race far more often and works to finer margins. Its plan changes when the race changes: rain, Safety Car, a set in crisis. And it doesn't know the future; it reads the same fraying forecast you do and mostly plays what's on track now. A pit wall that planned around knowing the track dries later wouldn't be playing the same game as you.

Safety Car. A full or virtual Safety Car slows everyone and makes a stop much cheaper. Nobody pits just because it's out; they pit because the smaller time loss now makes the sums work, and it works often enough that anyone on the fence takes it. A less obvious effect: behind the Safety Car cars run slowly and off-line, so the track nearly stops taking rubber, and a long early caution hands you back a greener surface. The feed goes quiet under caution too, since nobody's attacking or breaking away, and a half-second gap in a queue isn't a fight.

Under caution the gap column flickers between the time and an SC or VSC label rather than dropping the number. The field closes up, but those gaps are the one thing you need to judge a stop, and losing them would mean deciding blind at exactly the moment a stop is cheapest.

Running speed. The race starts stopped, with you on the grid, the forecast in front of you and both drivers in reach, so change a starting pace now if you're going to. You start it with the play button. The moments that matter, a Safety Car, a crash, one of your cars pitting, drop to slow motion for a lap and then return on their own to the speed you'd set, with your chosen pace still lit because it's still your call. When there's a real decision the race doesn't just slow, it stops and opens a window: slow motion to read, a pause to choose. After a pause you didn't ask for, the grid, an alert, a decision, it resumes at slow motion, since whatever stopped it is usually worth watching; after one you called yourself it resumes at the speed you had. Jump straight to fast-forward and that wins, because it's a clear instruction.

Trouble. Driver errors, contact, mechanical failures. The odds rise with rain, with tyres on the edge, with an aggressive pace, and with a car that's already hurt. A single mistake costs anything from a couple of tenths to the whole race. Reliability is a development area like any other, and a team that ignores it finds out the hard way.

After the flag. The post-race screen lays it all out: your two drivers, the money line by line, the new standings, the morale that moved, and, if a project finished that weekend, the upgrade that's just gone on the car.

The car doesn't get better on its own. It improves when you open a project, work it at the test bench, and it goes well.

Five areas. Engine, aero, chassis, reliability and compound stability. The first three feed into pace in different measures depending on the track: engine on fast circuits, aero through the corners, chassis a bit everywhere. Reliability holds off failures. Compound stability makes your tyres behave more predictably.

Starting a project. You choose the area, the direction and the length. The direction trades how much you might gain against how likely you are to gain nothing:

A short programme wraps up in a few races for less; a long one runs half a season for more and rarely collapses.

Who runs the bench is the third choice: one of your two drivers, or just the engineers. Each option lays out what it does. A driver makes every run more productive and lower-risk, more so the better they are, but it costs them some morale. Engineers alone add nothing and take nothing, and your drivers stay fresh. The first run's risk is shown before you commit, and it really does move with who you send.

The bench. One session per race. The project card tells you whether the bench is open this weekend or next and how many sessions are left, so finding it shut is the rule, not a missed turn. Within a session you can run the test as many times as you like, and each run raises the risk of the next. A session ends only two ways: you bank, which closes it rather than saving partway, or a run goes wrong. Anything not banked is gone at the end of the weekend, and you pick up next race from whatever you locked in. Before each run the game tells you its risk and its payoff. Knowing when to stop is most of the skill.

What can go wrong:

• > bench failure: the project breaks and restarts, and the work so far is lost
• > the bar left unfinished: the project is dropped, nothing arrives, and what you spent is spent
• > a scrapped package: a bold project can produce an upgrade that makes the car worse; you don't fit it, the car stays as it was, and the project is still over
• > flaws: the area improves but picks up a problem that costs you elsewhere
• > knock-on effects: a jump in one area can take something from another

When a project ends, the post-race opens a card for it: what happened, how far the area moved, the car's overall before and after, any flaws picked up, anything the bench turned up. If the project was dropped or the package scrapped, the card says so up front and the area sits where it was. Now and then the bench also finds something you weren't chasing, a discovery that leaves a lasting edge, and you can't plan for those.

The yearly ceiling. Each area can only grow so far in a season. It stops a team pouring a whole year into one area and leaves something to chase in later years. The game warns you as you near it, and anything past the limit is lost.

The other teams. They develop too, and not all alike. A team that's behind grows quicker than one in front, a rubber band that's there on purpose, but the growth isn't tidy: each team draws a form for the year, and some find something while others waste the season, occasionally going backwards. Each also has a home area it knows how to work and sticks with for years, which is where cars with a personality come from, an engine team flying on fast tracks and struggling in the streets. A team changes philosophy only rarely. Over several seasons the order genuinely moves, and whoever leads in year one may not lead in year five.

One currency, tokens, shown in the hub. Everything is paid in them: wages, development, the market, driver changes.

Coming in:

• > Title sponsor: most of your income. Each is a different trade, one paying a lot up front with nothing for results, another paying little up front and only rewarding you for running near the front. All set a season target worth a bonus if you hit it.
• > Technical sponsor: less money, something else instead. The one with the biggest fixed payment adds nothing more; the others give up some of it for a reward that only lands if it happens, a podium, a pole, high morale. The morale one pays in training points rather than tokens, and it's the best pick in an uncompetitive car, since podiums and poles go to the quick while morale helps a team that's still building.
• > Prize money: every race, for each car you finish in the top ten, rising steeply toward the podium and thinner on Hard.
• > Podium bonus: a flat extra for each driver on the podium.
• > Constructors' prize: at season's end, by where you finish.

Going out. Wages for two drivers and two staff, every race. Fixed running costs. Development projects. Signing fees for mid-season hires. Driver changes. Wages are the drain that never lets up: a top driver is paid race after race, not once.

Keeping the lights on. On Easy there's room to spare and you can afford long programmes. On Medium every choice has a real price. On Hard the account stays tight all year and one bad weekend bites straight away: fewer points, less prize money, less development, a car slipping back. No difficulty bankrupts you by itself, but on Hard, ending a season with two projects done instead of five shapes the next one, and that's where you find out how well you managed.

Alongside the championship, your career builds a score: a single number that only goes up, for measuring yourself against other players.

It's built on the championship points your two drivers score each race, so a good weekend moves it and you can see why. On top of that, wins, poles, one-two finishes, and the two titles at season's end all add to it, as does hitting your title sponsor's target.

Difficulty then multiplies the lot: once on Easy, twice on Medium, three times on Hard. That's what puts careers starting from different places on one board. In the worst car you finish further back, but every point is worth three, and across a season it evens out. A strong season on Easy still beats a poor one on Hard.

There are two boards. Career is the running total, which rewards playing long and playing well. Best season is your strongest single year, which rewards one big run.

Without Game Center the score still adds up and shows on the standings screen and after each race. The only thing you lose is the button to the global boards, and nothing in the game depends on being connected.