Car Traits

Status: planned, not yet implemented. This page documents the design intent so the wiki and the codebase stay in sync as the system lands.

The car traits system gives each chassis a small set of personality flags beyond raw component performance. Two cars with identical stats and identical drivers should still feel slightly different on track — same as in the real sport, where each season’s chassis has its own character (well-balanced, nervous on entry, strong on traction, etc.).

What a car trait is

A trait is a tagged behavioural modifier attached to the chassis. It’s:

• Permanent for the season — locked at season-start when the car is built, doesn’t change race-to-race
• Visible in the My Car / R&D screens — listed on the chassis sheet so you can plan around it
• Mechanical — alters specific physics terms in the race sim (small but consistent)
• Discoverable — some traits are revealed at season start, some only show up after track time
• Not stackable — each car has 2–4 traits maximum

Traits are flavoured to the 1990s feel: think “the car has a peaky engine band”, “the rear is loose under throttle”, “the front bites well on cold tires” — not generic +5% boosts.

Planned trait categories

Aero

Powertrain

Tire interaction

Reliability

How traits will be assigned

Two paths:

1. Stock chassis (career start, current code): the budget tier rolls 2–3 traits weighted by your team’s infrastructure profile. A high-Aero team is more likely to draw High Drag or Stable Floor; a high-Engine team draws powertrain traits.
2. Designed chassis (R&D): when you build a new chassis via the design tab, you can attempt to target a trait as part of the design brief. Targeting raises the cost (WU + budget) and isn’t guaranteed — design risk grows with the trait’s strength.

End-of-season reveal:

• Negative traits (Fragile Floor, Loose Rear) are visible from day one
• Positive traits (Late Cliff, Tire Whisperer) reveal after 3–5 race weekends of confirmation data

How traits will affect race tuning

Most traits plug into existing race-sim hooks — they don’t introduce new mechanics, they bias existing ones:

• Stable Floor → reduces side_by_side_off_line_penalty for this car
• Loose Rear → bumps mistake_base_prob × 1.15 in Zone::Accelerating
• Hot Hatch → shifts tire_optimal_low/high by +5°C
• Peaky Engine → engine_map curve gets steeper (sharper falloff at low maps, sharper bonus at high maps)

This means trait tuning happens in RaceConfig knobs you can already read — adding a trait is mostly hooking it into a few Car-level multipliers.

What it changes for the player

• Strategy: a Late Cliff car can run a 1-stop where most of the field needs 2 stops
• Setup: a Cold-Sensitive car wants longer out-laps in qualifying
• Risk management: a Fragile Floor car needs extra repair WU buffered after every race
• Driver match: a Loose Rear car begs for a high-CON driver; pairing it with a 5-CON rookie is a recipe for spins

Trait info will appear in:

• The Cars Overview / R&D screen (always)
• Driver pre-race brief (commentary “the car’s nervous on cold tires today”)
• Season summary (which traits paid off, which cost you points)

Open questions (not yet decided)

• Should traits be changeable mid-season via R&D big-spend? Or locked until next chassis?
• Do AI teams see and exploit their own traits? (Probably yes, with same visibility delay)
• Trait conflicts: can you have Loose Rear AND Smooth Torque together? (Probably no — exclusion sets)
• Persistence across seasons: does next year’s chassis inherit a “weighted toward” trait pool from this year’s?

These will be settled as the implementation lands.