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.

No 3D here. A session is told through the timing tower, the pit wall's commentary and numbers that need reading. On iPad there is also a plain top-down track above the commentary, with every car where it really is.

It's an invented championship. Teams, drivers, circuits and sponsors are all made up. There are no real names, logos or tracks, and the game says so when it starts.

The grid. Ten teams with two drivers each. One of them is yours: you pick the crest from the full set and type the name, and the team you don't take races for the AI. Twelve circuits, each with its own character (speed, tyre wear, risk of a mistake, rain, time lost in the pits), in a calendar that reshuffles every year.

MENU → create your team → HUB
                        ↓
          race weekend (repeats 12 times)
                        ↓
      track briefing → qualifying → strategy → race → post-race → front page
                        ↓
             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 ideal setup exists and you never get to see it. The rival teams run a pit wall that thinks the way yours does, develop their cars every year, and won't wait for your mistake.

Two modes. Career is the full game: whole seasons, money, development, standings, titles and the owners' mandate. You keep one career at a time, and it saves itself. Quick race is a single race with a team and drivers from the list, 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 from a single project, 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 owners' mandate. At the start of each season the owners tell you where they want you to finish in the constructors' table. The number isn't invented: it comes from where your car sits among the others, so with the worst car on the grid nobody asks for a podium. Finish two places better than expected and the target goes up the next year.

They don't judge one season. They look at the last two (three on Easy, the level for learning). What counts is how far below the target you have been on average over that window. Staying more than a place short, year after year, means losing the job and ending the career. One bad year can't sink you, and the weight of a single season is capped on purpose, because a project that fails, a driver who gets hurt or three Sundays in the rain happen to everyone. Two or three seasons under target do sink you: that isn't bad luck, it's management.

When you're on the edge the game says so with a number, not a feeling: «P4 or better to keep your job». The championship panel in the hub reminds you every week how far you are from the target and how much credit you have left. The last call is written plainly. It's there to decide how to play the season, not to find out in December.

It's the only way to lose. The emergency fund keeps you from going bankrupt and you fire your own drivers, so the owners are the only ones who can fire you. When it happens the career is over for good: the save is deleted and CONTINUE won't reopen it. You get a screen with what you did (seasons, wins, titles, score), and then you start again.

The other teams. Every rival has a home department (engine, aero or chassis) where it knows how to work and where most of its development goes, for years. And every year it gets the project right or wrong: some teams arrive in March with this year's car, others bring last year's. In the hub panel you hear about it when there is something to say: who has found something since the start of the season and where, who stood still, and who is ahead of you in the table and by how many points. One line at a time, and only when it's news.

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.

You can fire the track engineer and not replace them. It costs a two-wage severance, and from then on that wage isn't paid. It's the move for bad times: the cash breathes and the pit wall goes quiet. No tyre advice, no wear readings, no estimate of where you would rejoin if you stopped now, and nobody calls the crossover. You read the race alone.

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.

From here you can go back to the hub: the test bench, the market and training are there, and if you walked into the weekend a moment too early you don't have to run all of it to fix that. Going back gets you nothing. The weekend at that track still counts once, and so does the session with the coach.

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.

How much risk. It matters, and you can say by how much. Between neutral and flat out there are six tenths a lap, which on a tight grid is three rows. The price is that wrecked laps go from one in seventeen to one in eight, and aggressive sits exactly in the middle on both counts.

Slips. A mistake isn't always a disaster. Most of the time it's a slip: a couple of tenths gone, and the lap still counts, just uglier than it could have been. It's how you tell whether a disappointing time is the setup's fault or a half-slide on the way out of a corner. Only the bigger mistakes ruin the lap, and the biggest end in a spin or the wall.

Nobody can tell you what a slip cost to the hundredth. The lap the driver would have set without it doesn't exist. The pit wall gives you an order of magnitude, and you can hear it guessing: «a couple of tenths, give or take». It does this only for your cars, and only if you have someone at the pit wall who can estimate it. For a rival you see that he slipped, not what it cost him.

And it doesn't cost everyone the same. Asking a rookie for the limit throws away almost one lap in five, a veteran one in nine. Same button, two different bets. As for what finding the setup is worth: from where a rookie with a mediocre pit wall starts to where a veteran who knows the track arrives, there is half a second a lap.

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.

One notch doesn't show on one lap. Two identical laps wobble by a tenth for a veteran and a tenth and a half for a kid, and a notch is worth six hundredths. Two notches do show. That's why the driver's feeling and the engineer's diagnosis aren't decoration: they are how you settle a single notch, which the stopwatch alone can't. Or you run more, since three runs averaged halve the wobble. It isn't a detail to polish while you wait for the race. It's the gap between the second row and the sixth, and how much a notch weighs changes with the track. Where the ideal setup is already extreme there is more room to be wrong and a small mistake is forgiven; where it's centred you pay for it at once.

The setup screen. Each area is a row with a slider of five notches. Your value is the red square, and a blue diamond above a notch shows where your other car left that area. The same row carries two meters of filled cells: TRACK, how much this circuit feels that area, and DATA, how much you have worked out. They don't say where the answer is. They tell you where to spend the time you have left.

Under each area's name is its symptom, and it matters. The driver says «I have no downforce in the fast corners» and the engineer «we're too far on the load side», but those two sentences are information only if you know which row they are talking about.

Both ends of each row use the same words as the feedback: aero runs from − wing to + wing, the power unit from traction to punch. If the driver says he has no downforce, that's the direction.

Two cars, one team. Your two drivers drive the same car on the same track. They don't want opposite setups: they start from the same file, and their preferences agree on almost two axes out of three. Where they differ it's by a notch, rarely two. One is a bit more nervous, the other a bit more careful, and that's all.

So what you find on one car mostly holds for the other. If the first says he has no downforce in the fast corners, there is a good chance his teammate needs it too. That's why, after a run, the other car's data also grows, by half as much as the car that ran. Sending one out first to understand, then using what you learned on the other, is a real strategy.

Sometimes they lean on it. «It won't turn at all», «and not by a little»: when the driver or the engineer talks like that it's usually two notches short, not one. Usually: from a veteran or a five-star engineer you can bet on it nine times out of ten, from a rookie or a mediocre pit wall seven or eight. Never more, and never certainty. The bet is what gives the two adjustments their meaning. If you trust it and move two at once you save a run. If you misread it you've spent a lap making the car worse, and afterwards the driver says it's «different, but he can't tell if it's better».

How the last change went. When he comes back, before the feedback, the driver tells you how the change you made at the previous stop worked: green if that way is better, red if worse, grey if he can't say. It's the answer to the question you asked yourself leaving the pits, and it comes only now because only now is there a lap to work it out from.

How much that line is worth depends on the driver, like everything he says. A consistent veteran nails the axis and the direction almost every time. A rookie very often can't tell, sometimes blames the wrong area, and rarely calls it exactly backwards, and you only find that out by running more. One thing he always says, and it's worth hearing: touching three areas at once muddles the reading. Change one thing at a time and he tells you what it was. Change three and he tells you the car is different and not much else.

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.

The red flag. The track closes, everyone comes in, and the clock keeps running at half speed. Eight minutes of session become four for everybody. The red costs, and rightly, but it costs less than sitting in the garage, because the track is closed for the others too.

Those minutes aren't dead time. With the car in the pits the mechanics get their hands on it: the red flag gives you two free setup adjustments, without burning a run to earn them. It's the only time in the weekend you work for nothing, and the pit wall tells you when it happens. If there is no time left on the restart to go out and complete a lap, the session is extended by what it takes. Qualifying can't be decided by who didn't get to run.

While it happens the header says so. A SLOW MOTION tag appears (it becomes PAUSED when the session is really stopped), the 1/4 button lights up with a cyan edge (your choice stays yellow where it was, it isn't lost), and under the clock a strip fills up to the next minute. If you open a window the strip freezes where it is instead of disappearing, so the clock doesn't jump when a popup shows up. At quarter speed a session minute lasts sixteen real seconds, and without that strip a still clock looked like a frozen game.

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.

In Q2 and Q3 you adjust first thing, before going out. Between sessions the car sits in the garage and the pit wall has just finished studying the data from the one before. You have an adjustment ready (two with a cool-headed engineer), so you arrive with an opinion in hand and can act on it instead of burning a run to unlock the dial.

Nothing you have learned is lost. Setup, knowledge and what was said in the garage carry through Q1, Q2 and Q3. Going into Q2 you find the last opinion and the last verdict exactly where you left them: it's the same car, and the pit wall hasn't forgotten anything in half an hour. It's what lets a strong team use Q1 to understand instead of to set a time. Even between weekends something stays, 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 he's out and what pace he's 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.

The track in qualifying (iPad). Above the commentary there is a plain top-down track, as in the race, showing who is running and where. Cars leave the pit lane for the out-lap, run the flying lap and come back in. Whoever is in the garage doesn't show, except your two drivers, who stay visible in the pit lane while they are parked. A yellow flag puts a yellow halo on the track, a red one a red halo and empties it. Two cars never sit on the same spot: whoever is behind keeps a gap, and if two drivers leave together the second waits in the garage and tucks in before his lap. It's only the picture. Lap times don't change.

The in-lap. After the flying lap the driver doesn't come back in right away. He finishes an in-lap and enters through the pit lane. While he's out you can't send him out again, adjust his setup or change his tyres, but his time is already in the standings.

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.

A ribbon under the graph draws the stints in colour, one block per tyre, as wide as the laps it lasts, with a red edge if it ends below the threshold. Each preset carries a small version of its stints, so you can see the shape of the race before you pick it. Compounds are cards, the same ones you used in qualifying, and the whole screen fits on one page.

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. On the track engineer's radio you hear two different things, and it helps to keep them apart.

«Now is the moment.» Once the crossover has really passed, anyone will tell you, even a two-star engineer. That at this water level the slick beats the intermediate isn't a forecast, it's something you can see. He often says it by quoting someone: «Russo moved to slicks two laps ago and he's already quicker». That is a fact you can check yourself in the lap times.

«The track is drying.» This one is a warning. It arrives four laps ahead, and only a precise pit wall gives it: four stars, or three with the Strategy trait. It doesn't give you the lap, it tells you to get ready. Four laps is short on purpose. Any further out would be a riddle, and a pit wall that guesses is worth less than one that stays quiet.

Without a track engineer you hear neither.

Tapping the weather strip. The strip, in qualifying and in the race, can be tapped: it opens the sky reading. It adds nothing new to read, since the sky, the water on the track and which tyre family pays now are already up there. It gives you a way to read them, and how much the pit wall is willing to say about what you can't see yet.

A precise lap or minute is never given, whatever pit wall you have: that stays the live crossover call. And the line at the bottom isn't a figure, it's a way of looking, something like «the asphalt dries slowly, and the line first: watch the times of whoever dares, not the sky».

What the engineer says about compounds, and how. He doesn't give you tenths. He says «the Softs look quicker than the Mediums», «a touch better», «clearly better», «better than expected». Comparing compounds by watching a race's lap times is a reading, not a measurement: the laps are driven by different drivers, at different times, with the track rubbering in and the sky changing. Writing 0.623 seconds would be lying with three decimals.

The words are three: a touch, better, clearly. A one- or two-star engineer uses just one and speaks only when the gap is big. From three stars up he tells the three apart and commits on less evidence. There are three kinds of message:

• > «From everyone's times…»: the reading on the field, every car at the same tyre age, on dry only. It comes at most three times a race and repeats only if the news has changed. If the harder compound is doing better than the softer one, which on a dry track it shouldn't, the pit wall says so: «better than expected».
• > «In the current conditions…»: the comparison between your two cars when they are on different compounds at the same moment. It's the cleanest data there is: same car, same conditions, and the usual gap between the two drivers taken out.
• > «The change seems to pay…»: the verdict on the stop you just made.

Only a five-star engineer gives numbers, and only on the second kind. It's the only truly objective figure in a race, and at five stars it comes with both drivers' times and the difference to the hundredth. The other two stay words even at five stars: the reading on the field isn't precise enough for a number, and the verdict on a change compares two moments on a track that has rubbered in meanwhile. Without a track engineer the reading on the field comes from the driver, by feel: «It feels like the Softs are quicker than the Mediums».

Wear is another story and has its own message. When a tyre wears faster or slower than expected the pit wall says so in the same words as ever, «the Softs are fading faster than expected», «we can stretch the stint». A tyre-reading engineer sends these readings more often and on smaller gaps: it's his job.

The tyre card. Wherever you choose a tyre (qualifying, strategy, the pit panel in the race) the compound is a card with its name and two rows, GRIP and LIFE, in three cells. The soft is full grip and short life, the hard the opposite, the medium in between. Intermediates say only DAMP and wets SOAKED. It's what anyone who follows racing already knows, so it gives nothing of the model away.

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 doesn't tell everything that happens on track. It tells what concerns you:

• > Your two cars: everything.
• > Whoever is one place from you, ahead or behind: radios, plan changes, forced stops.
• > Whoever is two places from you, and whoever runs in the top three: overtakes, pit exits (with the tyre they fit), the real duels.
• > Everyone else: nothing. You still see their stops in the standings, with the PIT badge, and on the live track.

You no longer hear how long a rival lost in the pits. Knowing that a far-off car took 2.4 seconds changed nothing.

Tap one of your drivers to open the pit panel. At the top, one line: the tyre and the laps it has done, the stops made out of those planned, the laps to go and the state of the track. Then the graph that helps you decide. The dashed line is the current tyre if you stay out, the solid one the compound you chose, new. Below the red threshold you are past the limit the pit wall takes a tyre to. Two sentences sum it up, «staying out: makes it / won't make it» and «pitting: until lap X». There are no numbers on the axes. It's a shape.

Under the graph come the pit wall's advice, the compound analysis, the last laps, and the choice of compound and driving style after the stop. A strategy engineer makes the 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.

The live track (iPad). Above the commentary there is the track seen from above, and cars sit where they really are: the distance between two cars on the track is their time gap, and whoever is ahead is ahead. Yours have a halo and the surname, and of the rest you read only the top three. The ring around each car is the colour of its tyre.

• > Safety Car: it appears ahead of the field and the track takes a yellow halo, blue for the Virtual Safety Car. On its last lap it dives into the pit lane and the field restarts at the line.
• > Pit stops: the car leaves the circuit, enters the pit lane before the line and runs through it, slowly, before rejoining. The time lost is paid there.
• > Rain: you see it fall when the track is wet. In heavy rain it is denser, with longer streaks and a grey veil, and when the track is very wet (above 55% water) small puddles show on the tarmac, with rings spreading in them while it pours.

The twelve circuits each have their own shape, with plenty of corners. On iPhone there is no track: the screen is too short for it to be any use.

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, go into slow motion: the race drops to 1X for a lap, then returns on its own to the speed you had set. The button you pressed stays lit during slow motion, because it's still your choice, and the button for the speed that is really running gets a cyan edge, the same colour as the SLOW MOTION tag in the header. So you read it all at once: what you asked for, what is happening, and that you didn't ask for it.

When there is something to decide the race doesn't just slow down. 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 always resumes at 1X, because what stopped it is usually something you want to watch unfold. After one you called yourself it resumes at the speed you had. Jump straight to 4X or 8X and that wins: an explicit choice always does.

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: the engine rules on fast circuits, aero where you corner, the chassis a bit everywhere. Reliability keeps failures away. Compound stability makes tyres less unpredictable.

The car level, the number that sums the car up, is the average of the five, but they don't weigh the same: the four that decide pace count one each, compound stability counts half. It's worth knowing because the car is born with its stability lowest of all. It is almost always the weakest area, and developing it for that reason buys points worth half as much.

The rubber band. Nobody stays behind forever and nobody runs away forever. Whoever is chasing develops faster, because know-how spreads and the cars behind copy what they see. It goes for the rival teams as much as for you. Start low and you can climb back; lead and the pack stays within reach, so next year the racing starts again. It isn't enough to hand you anything: chasing helps, it doesn't replace the right choices.

Opening a project. You choose the area, the direction and the length.

The three directions have the same average return. What changes is how much that average can swing:

So the question isn't «which pays more». It's «what do I need right now»: ten points off the best car calls for an upside tail, leading the championship calls for no surprises. None of the three is right in general, and the game's own simulations check exactly that.

The two lengths are the only choice that decides when the package arrives. The short one closes in a single race and brings less; the long one takes three races and brings more. Short pays while an area is young and every token returns a lot; long pays when the area is mature and short runs out of steam. The long one also has three bench sessions instead of one, so it ends with a full bar far more often.

Who goes to the bench is the third choice, three cards side by side: one of the two drivers, or the engineers alone. Each card says what it brings, in numbers. A driver makes every run pay more (from +8% for a rookie to over +30% for a star) and lowers the risk of each run (by up to about ten points), but it costs him ten morale. Engineers alone bring nothing and take nothing away, and the drivers stay fresh.

The risk of the first run is written in the summary before you confirm, and it really does change with who you send.

The bench. One session per race. The programme card always says whether the bench is open now or from next weekend, and how many sessions are left. Finding it closed isn't a skipped session, it's the rule.

Inside a session you can repeat the test as often as you like, and every run raises the risk. A session ends in only two ways: when you bank, which closes it (it isn't an intermediate save), or when a run goes wrong. The risk you see is the real one, with no hidden discount, and what you have banked is banked: nothing touches it.

The package arrives for what it's worth. This is the rule that matters most: a project can't be lost any more. When the sessions end the package arrives anyway, and it's worth as much as the bar is full. Bar at 60%, package at 60%. Only below 40% is there not enough work to bring it to the track. Then it's scrapped and half the tokens come back.

A run that goes wrong doesn't zero the session: half of the unbanked data is saved, and the other half is the price of having pushed. The project goes on with less work inside, and the package arrives poorer.

It's worth saying because it used to be the opposite, and it was the worst thing in the game: full bar or nothing. A long programme cost four tokens and three races to give nothing back, and you found out three races after deciding. Now the bench asks «how much do I take home», not «do I take anything home».

There is still plenty to play for. Whoever banks every session almost always delivers the full package; whoever pushes every time delivers two thirds. Stopping in time is still half the trade, only now a mistake costs a part and not everything.

What can still go wrong:

• > a run that goes wrong: half of that session's data is thrown away, and the bench reopens after the next race
• > a bar far from the target: the package arrives reduced, and below 40% it's scrapped with a half refund
• > the bad outcome of the bold direction: the package is worth the minimum, because only the part that worked is fitted
• > points beyond the season ceiling: those are really lost

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, the bar at delivery if the package came in incomplete, the sessions lost at the bench and the discoveries.

Technical discoveries. Now and then the bench produces something you weren't looking for, a discovery with a lasting edge. You can't schedule it. It happens.

The experimental road. When an intuition comes out of the bench and you have already filled half the bar, the technical department asks you a question. The new geometry can be followed all the way, but that means throwing out the current layout and starting again from there.

How willing the department is depends on your design chief: at three stars it's 65%, at five stars 75%. It's the choice where a good one matters more than anywhere else, and they tell you the percentage before they ask.

The offer comes once per project, and only when there is really something to lose. Below half a bar it isn't a gamble, it's a dice roll. Say no and you lose nothing: the intuition stays, with the extra point it carries by itself. It's the only way a project can still be lost entirely. The game doesn't do it to you. You decide it, and you know when you decide.

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 do in later years. As you near the ceiling the game says so, and points past the limit are lost.

The other teams. They develop too, and not all alike. Whoever is behind grows faster than whoever leads: the rubber band is there on purpose. But it isn't tidy growth. Each team draws a year at the start of the season, and some find the key while others lose the year. A few developments take the wrong road and the car goes backwards.

Every team also has a home department, the one it knows how to work, and it keeps at it for years. That's where cars with a character come from: an engine team flies on fast tracks and suffers in the city. Now and then it changes philosophy, but rarely. The result is that the order of the grid really moves, and whoever leads in year one isn't bound to 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.