A small update that answers the first review the game received. Two of its complaints were real bugs and both are fixed; the third was that the game does not explain itself, so now it does. Your existing careers load and continue.

You can turn the sound off

• Settings now has an audio section with separate Master, Music and Effects volume. Set music to zero and it stays there — the levels are saved and restored when you next launch.

Free practice no longer appears to lock up

• The keyboard no longer goes dead after using the on-screen help button. Opening help by clicking the chip moved keyboard control onto the chip itself and left it there, so pause, speed, team orders and skip all stopped answering while the mouse carried on working. That was the lock-up.
• Releasing a car from the garage can be cancelled. Press LEAVE PITS once to start the countdown, press it again to hold the car — previously the second press did nothing, which made the button look broken.
• The button says what it will do, and the status line counts the release down, so you always know which state you are in.
• The live session screen now takes keyboard control back if anything else ever holds on to it, so a dead keyboard cannot persist for a whole session.

A race sounds like a race

• The soundtrack no longer plays over a live session. Crowd and engines only, from the moment the session starts until you leave it — and the playlist picks up where it left off afterwards rather than restarting.

A session is run once

• The EXIT control has been removed from live sessions, and Escape no longer leaves one. You either watch the session out or press F to simulate the rest of it — both produce a full, recorded result.
• Leaving a session part-way and restarting it meant a bad qualifying lap or an early accident could simply be retried until it went well. Results are worth having only if they stand, so that route is closed.

And a way back, if a week goes badly

• The main menu has a new RESTORE LAST WEEK option. It returns your career to the start of the week you most recently left — before the race weekend you just ran, if you have run one.
• It asks twice before doing it, and it is deliberately the slow, deliberate route: you lose the whole week, not just the session that went wrong.

Team orders behave like team orders

• The HOLD / SWAP / RACING controls no longer appear during practice and qualifying, where there are no positions to swap. They previously accepted the instruction and wrote it into the session log.

Simulating shows you it is working

• Simulating a session now displays its progress instead of sitting silent and then jumping to the result.
• Skipping to the end of a session asks first. It is a big action and it used to happen on a single press.

The game explains itself

• Press F1 anywhere for help on the screen you are looking at, with a contents list covering 41 topics across the whole game.
• The first time you reach a screen, its help opens by itself. It stays out of your way during a live session, and you can switch the behaviour off entirely.
• A full written player guide ships alongside the game.

Under the hood

• An automated suite of 188 tests covers the race model, the career and the save format.
• Additive save data only: careers from 0.5.0 load, autosave and continue.

Thank you to the player who left that first review. It was specific enough to find the actual bugs behind it, which is more useful than it might have felt to write.