Country Profile

The Country Profile is a nation’s motorsport dossier: its 1990 macro figures, its national hall of fame, the engine manufacturers that hail from it, the circuits located there, and where it sits in the series-fame ladder. It is the fourth of the profile pages, alongside driver, team, circuit and manufacturer.

A country only has a page once it is engaged in your career.

How to open it

Every flag in the game is a door:

• Circuit Profile — click the flag or the country name.
• Team Profile — same.
• Manufacturer Profile — same.
• PFS Series page → Countries tab — click any nation in the fame ranking.

Esc or Back closes it.

Engagement

country_engaged gates the page: a nation qualifies if at least one driver (from the pool, the hall-of-fame archive, your roster or any AI roster) or one signed sponsor (yours or an AI team’s) originates there. Nothing else counts — a country that only hosts a circuit is not engaged. Ask for an unengaged country and there is simply no page.

Country fields are stored inconsistently across the save (ISO codes in some places, display names in others), so every lookup is normalised: three characters or fewer is treated as an ISO code, anything longer is mapped through the name table.

Key figures panel

The macro data is real 1990 reference data loaded from the country table, not generated. It is what makes wealthy nations host more Grands Prix and produce more manufacturers.

National Hall of Fame

The country’s top 10 drivers, ranked. Per row: rank, name (clickable → his driver profile), a series badge, titles, wins, best finish and starts. Retirees carry a grey (retired) tag.

The 0.5.2 rule: every driver is shown at his highest level

This is the panel’s defining behaviour, and it is not obvious.

A driver’s flat career counters mix every series he ever raced — the PF2/PF3 background simulation folds its results into them at each rollover. Listing those raw totals would produce a phantom statline: a PF3 champion would appear to be a champion of nothing in particular.

Instead, each driver is reduced to the record of the single most prestigious series he has actually raced, and tagged with that series’ badge:

• If he has any PFS start or title, the row shows his PFS-only numbers — flat counters minus every dev-series-tagged season row.
• Otherwise, the highest feeder tier he raced: PF2 before PF3, using the sum of that series’ tagged rows only.
• A driver who has never started anywhere shows an em-dash badge and zeroes.

Badge colours: PFS gold, PF2 amber, PF3 green.

So a row reading PF3 · 1 title · 6 wins means exactly that: one PF3 title and six PF3 wins. Nothing is inflated and nothing is hidden.

Ranking order

Series prestige comes first. A record only means what its level means, so every PFS driver outranks every ladder driver — a two-time PF2 champion sits below a PFS driver with no titles at all. Within a series:

1. Series rank (PFS, then the ladder by ascending tier, then never-started).
2. Most titles.
3. Most wins.
4. Best finish (lowest position; a driver who never classified sorts last).
5. Most starts.
6. Name, alphabetically, as the deterministic tie-break.

Deduplication

The panel aggregates the driver pool, the hall-of-fame archive, your roster and every AI roster. The same person can appear in several of those — a signed driver keeps a mirror line in the pool — so rows are merged by numeric driver id (falling back to the three-letter code), keeping the richest record and making the retired flag sticky.

Retirees are included on purpose: process_retirements removes a driver from every roster and from the pool, so the hall-of-fame archive is the only place his record still exists.

Engine suppliers panel

Every engine brand in the supplier directory that originates in this country — signed or not — with its PFS record.

Sorted by prestige, then share, then name.

Two things worth knowing:

• Share here is grid share, not market share. It is the fraction of active teams (you plus every non-retired AI team) on this engine — a completely different number from the road-car sector share on the manufacturer page.
• Prestige here is the blended figure, the same one the Suppliers directory shows. The manufacturer profile displays the pure racing prestige. They will not match, and both are correct for what they measure.

Empty state: “No engine supplier hails from this country.”

Circuits panel

Every venue in the world pool located in this country — not just the ones on this season’s calendar.

Sorted by seasons hosted, then average media rating, then name. Every row is clickable, calendar round or not — the circuit profile resolves from the pool.

Empty state: “No circuit in the world pool is located here.”

Series fame — how countries are ranked

The score the Key-figures panel quotes, and the ranking behind the PFS Series page’s Countries tab. It measures how big the series is in a country, not how good its drivers are.

fame = drivers_pts + circuits_pts + engines_pts + sponsors_pts

drivers_pts  = over the country's TOP 5 hall-of-fame rows:
                 titles×150 + wins×25 + podiums×8 + top-tens×2
circuits_pts = rounds of THIS season's calendar held there × 80
engines_pts  = engine suppliers from the country on the grid × 120
sponsors_pts = combined sponsor money per GP from the country's brands
                 (player + active AI teams, at the partner-adjusted
                  effective rate) ÷ 25 000

Ties break on country name. The Countries tab shows all four components separately, so you can see why a nation ranks where it does.

Three consequences worth internalising:

• A title is worth six wins (150 vs 25). The ladder is dominated by champions.
• The driver term reads the same top-series slice as the hall of fame, so ladder-only drivers contribute their PF2/PF3 numbers — real, but earned at a lower level.
• A country can rank high with no drivers at all, purely on circuits, engines and sponsor money. Three calendar rounds and two engine suppliers is 480 points before a single driver is counted.

The ranking only covers engaged countries, and it recomputes from scratch every time it is asked — nothing is cached or stored.

Advanced

• Use it as a scouting map. A country with a strong engine industry and several circuits but a thin hall of fame is a market whose drivers are cheap and whose sponsors are rich.
• The (on grid) and (on calendar) tags are the live-vs-historic divider. Everything else on the page is history; those two are this season.
• The 1990 macro figures are causal, not decorative. GDP² weights the circuit lottery and the team-country draw, so a high-GDP country genuinely produces more of the world you play in.
• A driver’s badge can change between seasons. A PF3 graduate who makes his PFS debut flips from a PF3 row to a PFS row — and his numbers drop to his PFS-only totals, which will be near zero. That is not a bug; it is the page telling you he is starting again at a higher level.
• Retired champions never leave. They are the reason a country’s hall of fame is stable across decades of career time.
• The whole page is data-only apart from the flag, which is why its ordering and fame formula are covered by tests rather than by eyeballing.

Common mistakes

• Reading a PF2/PF3 row as a PFS record. The badge is the whole point. A green PF3 badge next to two titles means two junior titles.
• Expecting the biggest names at the top regardless of series. Series prestige outranks everything, including titles. A PFS journeyman is listed above a ladder champion.
• Comparing this panel’s supplier prestige with the manufacturer page’s. Blended vs pure racing.
• Confusing Share (grid) with sector market share (road cars). Same word, different worlds.
• Assuming a country with circuits has a page. Engagement needs a driver or a sponsor; circuits alone do not qualify.
• Treating series fame as national talent. It is reach — circuits, engines and sponsor money are three of its four terms.

See also

• PFS Series page — the Countries tab and the full fame ranking
• Driver Profile — where a hall-of-fame name leads
• Manufacturer Profile — where a supplier name leads
• Circuit Profile — where a circuit name leads
• Development series — what the PF2 and PF3 badges mean
• World Data — the Economy tab, the sponsor-money view of the same countries
• Suppliers — the blended prestige used in the directory
• Career Setup — choosing your own team’s country