URS1 — 0.9.3 Bringing The Game Closer to Racing

Until this build, a car in the 3D view slid along the racing line with its wheels turning. It was in the right place at the right speed, but it never actually steered. Every car on the model now drives: it turns the wheel, leans on its outside tyres, dips under braking and follows the road over a crest. The same update solves the racing line itself properly — as the fastest way round rather than the shortest — and that turned out to change how the whole race runs, from where pole comes from to how much fuel a race needs. Your existing careers load and continue.

The cars drive the road

• Every car steers. The nose turns in before the car moves across, an overtake is an arc with the front wheels visibly angled, and cars turn in for the corner ahead instead of sliding sideways onto the racing line.
• The body leans outward through corners, dips under braking and squats on the throttle, while all four tyres stay planted on the road.
• Cars pitch to the gradient, so a car crests a hill and drops down the other side rather than floating level over it.
• Cars rejoining from the pit lane hold the exit lane and then merge when there is room, instead of arriving on the racing line the moment they cross it. The fault behind this was measured on thirty-nine of the forty-one circuits — it was a rounding error at the point where the pit exit meets the start of the lap — and it is fixed on all of them.
• Fixed: cars looked blurred in the pit lane. Pit-lane movement was drawn in 20 Hz steps while the track around it was drawn smoothly, and the anti-aliasing turned that stepping into a fuzzy double edge which snapped clean at the pit exit. The pit lane is drawn at full frame rate now.
• Fixed: cars flickering across the pit lane, appearing briefly in other teams' boxes and clearing if you changed the speed and came back.
• Timing, gaps and contact are exactly what they were. This is how the race is shown, not how it is decided.

The fastest way round, not the shortest

• Cars used to sit on the inside of the road through most of a corner, because that is the short way and nothing in the simulation made it slow. The line is now solved as a path: it runs wide, turns in, takes the apex and unwinds to the outside on the exit, and it does that because it is genuinely quicker rather than because a rule says so.
• Every circuit on the calendar is between 4.3% and 9.2% faster on the new line — a median of 6.5% — and the tight corners are taken on 10% to 34% more radius.
• Where a car puts itself on the road now costs or saves it time. Running wide to defend, being shoved off line, or cutting inside to make a move are all settled by the physics of the path the car is actually on — a tighter line is a slower corner but a shorter lap, and which one wins depends on the corner.
• Qualifying is timed on the same road the race is driven on. The reference lap was still being solved down the middle of the track, which is why pole could come out slower than race pace, why safety-car laps were paced too slowly, and why race fuel was being calculated for a lap nobody drove. All three come off the racing line now.
• The wet line is a real alternative line again. In the rain, cars move meaningfully off the polished dry groove at the apexes instead of tracking it a few inches to one side.

The race weekend screen is seven channels

• The race screen is now seven channels across the top — LIVE ROOM, PIT WALL, STRATEGY, TIMING, THE TRACK, EVENTS, CAR STATUS — instead of one surface behind a rail of data types. The band at the top never changes, so the lap, the flag and both of your cars stay on screen whichever channel you are on, and leaving one costs you nothing.
• The channels ask for your attention instead of taking it. Nothing switches itself. A channel that wants a look marks its own tab: PIT WALL when a call is armed or a window opens, STRATEGY when a planned stop has come and gone, CAR STATUS when a car is carrying damage, EVENTS when race control or your own team has something in it.
• PIT WALL answers one question per car — what it is on, how long it will last, when it comes in, and what any damage is costing a lap.
• STRATEGY is a channel of its own: both cars' stops, the compounds, whether the fuel reaches the flag, and the sets you have left. It reads in every session, so a plan can be made in practice.
• CAR STATUS now shows what is actually damaged. The parts sheet listed every component's condition and nothing else, so a car the pit wall said was losing three tenths a lap to damage read GOOD on every line, with nowhere to find out why. Damage now shows on the part that has it — a wing, a floor, a sidepod, a suspension corner, the gearbox — and the sheet's header carries what it is costing, taken from the same figure the pit wall quotes.
• The race record is reachable during a race. Pressing E opened nothing before; it is now the EVENTS channel, filtered and scrollable, with the race running on behind it.
• Pause, the speed control and SIM END have moved into the channel bar and are reachable from every channel. At the foot of the old rail they were the one place a full-screen page could not reach.
• Two pages have moved: TELEMETRY is now opened from the CAR STATUS deck, and SYSTEM sits behind its own button rather than in the channel row.
• Fixed, and worth knowing about if you played 0.8.1: with a full-screen page open, the controls underneath it still accepted clicks. A click in what looked like empty space could change a tyre compound or arm a pit stop, with nothing on screen to tell you it had happened.
• The live view is wider at every resolution, and the deck no longer overlaps its own buttons at 1600x900.

Car Damage - Pit Stop Repairs

• Teams bring a damaged car in to have it fixed. A band of light-to-moderate damage was supposed to be left to a strategist weighing the pace loss against the twenty-odd seconds a stop costs. There was no strategist. Nothing in the simulation had ever acted on it, so a car in that band carried its damage to the flag every time, on every circuit, in every era.
• The call is now arithmetic rather than a threshold: what the damage will cost between here and the flag, against what the stop will cost on this particular circuit. So the same torn sidepod is worth fixing on lap 8 of 60 and worth carrying on lap 52 — which is the whole point, and is something a pair of fixed thresholds could not express.
• A long pit lane is a real argument for driving on, and each circuit's own figure settles it. A bolder pit wall comes in sooner. A stop already scheduled within a few laps counts as the repair and cancels the extra one.
• Expect mid-race repair stops in long races that have never happened before. The same rule governs your team and every rival's.
• What damage costs a lap now has a single definition, read by the repair decision, the withdrawal assessment and the pit wall's readout alike, so the three can no longer disagree with each other about the same car.

Cars Behavior on Track

• A car that fails at speed slows down like a car. It used to drop to half speed on the spot the instant it failed, which the car behind could not physically avoid, and then slide across to the road edge whether or not anyone was alongside. It now keeps rolling and sheds its speed under braking, brakes with the car in front if the field is slowing for a safety car, and only moves over once the lane beside it is clear.
• The field goes round a stopped car. A car that has broken down or crashed and is still on the racing surface is now something every driver steers around, including under a safety car, where the train used to hold its line straight through it.
• The safety car now runs at the pace the rulebook prints. "SC Lap Time Multiplier" on the regulations screen was a number nothing obeyed: the train circulated at a fixed fraction of each car's top speed, so a neutralised lap cost something different at every circuit and drifted further every time green pace improved. It is solved from the circuit now, against the green laps the race is actually doing: across the field a neutralised lap costs x1.38 against a printed x1.40, at every circuit on the calendar, and changing that figure in an era's rules genuinely changes the race.
• Fixed: a healthy car on a modest team looked like a broken one. Smoke from the back of the car and the driver's "losing power" calls were triggered by the car's reliability rating rather than by anything going wrong, so a perfectly sound car on a smaller team could smoke from lights out, and most of the field could be doing it by the second race of a season. Both now measure a car against its own healthy baseline, so they mean what they say.

Watch Any Race Back

• A race simulated straight from the weekend screen is now recorded. The 0.8.1 notes said it was not, and that was true — but it was the wrong way round, because the race you did not watch is exactly the one you cannot otherwise ask about. Press R on the results screen for a race you never saw.
• URS1 now keeps the twenty most recent replays and removes the oldest as new ones arrive. Nothing ever deleted them before, at roughly 6 MB a race — a long career quietly accumulated gigabytes in a folder no part of the game would show you.

The Garage

• Run length is measured against the fuel in the car. In practice and qualifying the run planner stops where the fuel stops and says how many laps the load covers; taking fuel out shortens the run rather than leaving it set to a number the car cannot reach.
• The weekend screen warns you about your cars before you race them. If either car has a component that is worn out, damaged or failed, the CAR STATUS tile turns amber or red and names the worst one. Nothing is blocked — if you want to race it, race it.
• "Damaged" now means damaged. A part-worn power unit used to be reported in the same words as crash damage, so a car that had never been touched could read DAMAGED on the grid. Condition readings now have their own words: FRESH, PART WORN, HIGH MILEAGE, END OF LIFE.

Rival Teams

• Teams decide for themselves when to fit fresh components. A team with strong engineers and money behind it changes parts early; a team without either runs them longer and sometimes finds out why. What a part has left, what the next race will take out of it, what a replacement costs against the balance, and what the fit costs in grid places all go into the call — and the same rule applies to your team as to every rival's.
• Fixed: an overtake could be written into the race record twice.

Known Issues

• The safety car itself — the head of the train — still runs about 6% slower than the printed multiplier, even though the field as a whole now lands on it. Known, measured across five circuits, and not yet fixed.
• Lapped cars released to unlap themselves often do not get all the way round. With the safety car now circulating at the pace the rulebook prints rather than well under it, one lap of unlapping gains a car about a third of a lap instead of nearly half — which is what it gains in reality too. The manoeuvre runs, the release is correct, and nobody gains a lap they did not drive; the cars simply re-join the train still a lap down more often than they used to.

Under The Hood

• The automated suite is now 246 tests covering the race model, the career, the presentation layer and the save format — up from 238 at 0.8.1.
• No save format change. Careers from 0.8.x load, autosave and continue, and so do careers from 0.5.x.

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