Weekend Loadout | The Undercut Wiki

The Loadout screen is the first thing you see when a race weekend opens. It decides what physically travels to the Grand Prix: how many cars (2, or 3 with the mule) and which spare parts. Everything you leave behind is unreachable until the chequered flag — the truck is packed and the factory is 2000 km away.

Confirming the loadout locks your inventory for the whole weekend. That lock is not cosmetic: it disables selling, purchases and rush production until the race is over.

How to open it

Hub → Go Racing / Next GP on a normal race weekend. The order is: Weekend Loadout → Free Practice plan → practice → weekend repair → Qualifying Run Plan → qualifying → Race Strategy → race.
GP 1 of a season reaches it through the same door (the season presentation exits into the loadout, not straight into the practice plan).
Pre-Season Testing (0.5.2) also packs a truck first — the loadout opens for the test’s own random venue before its run plan. See Free Practice.

Back (header button, Esc, gamepad B) returns to the Hub with the weekend untouched — Go Racing re-opens the loadout pre-filled. Enter or the green Go to race weekend ▶ confirms.

What the loadout locks, and why

A WeekendLoadout stores two things: cars (2 or 3) and taken — a list of indices into your part inventory. Indices, not part ids. That is the whole reason for the lock: any operation that reorders or shortens part_inventory would silently re-point the truck at different parts.

Availability at the track (part_taken) resolves like this:

Part	Travels?
Fitted to car 0 or 1	Always (its car races)
Fitted to car 2 (the mule)	Only on a 3-car weekend
Unfitted spare	Only if ticked in the loadout
Anything, outside a weekend	Always (no loadout → everything available)

Forbidden while a loadout is active

Action	Status at the track
Sell a spare (R&D → Inventory)	Blocked — the Sell button is not drawn
Buy New Part (R&D → Repair)	Blocked — the “New $xxK” button is hidden, replaced by Swap spare
Rush production (+50%)	Blocked — button greyed with an explanation; an instant part could not reach the track anyway
Equip a part left at the factory	Blocked — the row reads At factory / Left at the factory

Still allowed

Standard production orders (“Order (next GP)”) — the job is queued and delivered after the GP, so it never touches this weekend’s inventory indices.
Repair with weekend work units, Improve, Design — none of them add or remove inventory rows.
Equipping / swapping parts that travelled, including the weekend Repair tab’s Swap spare (fits the best race-ready spare that made the trip).
A part you swap off a car at the track is automatically registered as taken, so you can bolt it back on later in the weekend.

The loadout is cleared automatically when the race finishes (weekend_loadout = None — “the whole inventory is back”), when you Abandon a weekend from the resume prompt, and when the Pre-Season Test session completes.

Circuit panel (left column)

The same data blocks as the Circuit Profile page, resolved once when the screen is built:

Mini-map of the track outline on green ground (regenerated from the seed if the calendar entry has no cached outline).
Key facts: Length (km), Turns, Laps, Race distance (km), Weather, and the three derived characteristics — Downforce, Tire wear, Overtaking — colour-coded from the circuit’s TrackCharacter.
Race history: one row per past race here (newest first) with Year, Winner, DNF count, Safety Cars and a 5-star Media rating. “No race has been held here yet” on a first visit.

Use it to size the truck: a high-tyre-wear, high-DNF circuit with an ugly history is where you want spare wings and a third car.

Cars: 2 or 3

Two clickable cards, each with livery miniatures and a tick box.

2 cars — race cars only. The mule stays at the factory; its fitted parts are unavailable all weekend.
3 cars — the mule travels; its fitted parts become available at the track (so they can be cannibalised onto a race car via Equip/Swap).

The card sub-line names your Reserve driver when you have one. Note that taking 3 cars does not field a third entry — the sim still runs two cars per team. The mule is a rolling spares rack for the weekend.

There is no cost difference between 2 and 3 cars, so the only reason to pick 2 is roleplay or a deliberately thin operation.

Tyres

Two rows (Soft / Hard) with the standard HUD compound badges, and an allowance figure. Today both read Unlimited and the footnote says “Tyre limits are a series rule set.”

That is literal: the tyre-set cap comes from loadout_tire_limit, which reads the active loadout-limit rule set. The category exists and is fully wired, but no rule of that category is active in the base game, so the accessor returns None. A future season regulation or a mod pack can turn it on with zero code changes.

Compound choice itself is not made here — it is picked (and locked for the whole weekend) on the Qualifying Run Plan.

Spare parts

One table row per component (11 of them), with the part icon, the display name, and a count badge:

×N — how many spares of that component you have ticked (no limit active).
N/limit in red when a limit is active and you are over it.

Inside each row, every unfitted part of that component is drawn as an Inventory-style card:

Tick case — green check when taken. Click the row to toggle.
Designation badge — the part’s version name; blue when it is your current default production design, grey otherwise.
Rating badge — performance on the R&D 0–100 scale, (current_perf − 0.92) / 0.16 × 100, clamped 0–200. Colours: purple ≥ 100 (overdrive), green ≥ 70, amber ≥ 45, red below.
damaged in red when the part is not race-ready: current_perf < initial_perf × 0.5. It can still travel, but it cannot take a start.
ILLEGAL (grey, untickable) when the part fails part_is_weekend_legal — today that only happens under a frozen/spec component rule: a frozen part must carry the federation spec (same initial_perf, same trait count) to be legal.

Fitted parts are never listed here; they travel with their cars.

The footer restates the contract: “Fitted parts travel with their cars. During the weekend only the parts taken here are available — no purchases, no production, no sales until the race is done.”

Auto select

The blue Auto select button in the SPARE PARTS header runs auto_loadout at the current car count. For each of the 11 components it takes every spare that is:

unfitted,
race-ready (current_perf ≥ initial_perf × 0.5),
weekend-legal,

sorted by current_perf descending, then truncated to the per-part limit if one is active. With no limit active this is “take everything usable” — which is exactly the pre-loadout behaviour, and what the AI teams effectively do (AI teams carry no WeekendLoadout, so part_taken returns true for their whole stock).

The screen also pre-fills itself on open: last weekend’s stored loadout if one exists, otherwise auto_loadout(save, 3). So the default is “3 cars, everything usable” and you only need to touch it deliberately.

Auto select deliberately skips damaged spares. If you want a broken part at the track to repair it there with weekend WU, tick it by hand.

Rule-set part limits

loadout_part_limit reads the same rule-set catalogue as the tyre limit. The published (but inactive) entry, loadout_allowance_std — “Weekend allowance” — would cap the truck at 2 spares per component and 13 tyre sets.

When a limit is active:

clicking an untaken part is refused once you are at the cap for that component (silent, no dead-click state change);
the component’s count badge turns red when over;
the SUMMARY panel adds “Over the weekend allowance — remove spares before confirming.”

That warning is advisory: the Go button does not block a confirm, and an over-limit state can only arrive from a pre-existing loadout, since the click handler enforces the cap.

Parts of different versions may travel together, as long as each is legal.

Front wings are special

Spare front wings are the one loadout item the race simulation itself consumes. weekend_spare_front_wings counts the race-ready, unfitted front wings that travelled and hands that number to both of your cars as a shared stock; the sim spends it on in-race nose changes.

After the race, consume_spare_front_wings scraps one spare front wing per change actually performed — and it scraps the worst race-ready spare first, because the fitted wing already carries the final race state through the damage write-back.

Leaving front wings at home is therefore not a neutral choice: a car that loses its nose with no spare at the track cannot have one fitted.

Advanced

The 0-spare speedrun is a real trap. Nothing forces you to take anything. Confirm an empty truck and a destroyed fitted part means a DNS — the run-plan panel greys out with “DID NOT START” and you race one car.
A part that is not race-ready is not a spare. part_race_ready is the single predicate shared by the DNS gate, the Inventory tick box and Auto select. Half of as-built performance is the line.
Take 3 cars by default. The mule’s fitted set is a free, complete second spares rack and costs nothing to bring.
Standard production is the loadout-friendly order. If a delivery would be useful next round, order it during the weekend at standard price — the lock only stops rush.
Damage repaired between sessions counts. The weekend repair step (after practice, before qualifying) runs on weekend_wu_remaining = compute_wu_pool(engineering) / 5, i.e. a fifth of your Engineering pool — separate from the annual R&D pool. Bring parts you might want to repair, not only parts you want to fit.
Reload safety. The loadout is persisted (career_meta key weekend_loadout) and survives a quit mid-weekend; resuming re-enters at the persisted step with the same truck. Abandoning the weekend rolls back to .weekend.db and clears it.

Common mistakes

Selling spares to raise cash mid-weekend. The button simply isn’t there. Sell before you click Go Racing, or wait for the debrief.
Rushing a replacement part after a practice crash. Rush is blocked at the track. The at-track fix is Swap spare — which only works if the spare travelled.
Leaving front wings at home on a street circuit. No spare nose at the track = no nose change in the race.
Assuming “3 cars” means a third entry. It does not. The mule is spares, not a driver.
Reading the SUMMARY warning as a hard gate. It is advisory; the Go button always confirms.
Trusting the tyre “Unlimited” line forever. It reflects the active rule set. A mod pack or a future regulation can cap it, and then Auto select starts truncating.