Appearance
Rank and Championship
The festival's progression variable is Rank, and it measures driving, not status.
Two classifications
The festival keeps two entirely separate tables:
| Driver Rank | Team Standings | |
|---|---|---|
| Who it ranks | Individual drivers | Teams |
| Structure | Five separate ladders, one per discipline | One combined table across all five disciplines |
| What feeds it | That driver's own points in that discipline | Both team entries' points in every event, summed |
| What it decides | The protagonist's Grade, discipline titles, and whether the team covers every discipline for qualification | Whether the team qualifies, and which team wins the festival |
There is no combined Driver Rank in the regular season. A driver is ranked once per discipline, never overall. The only individual overall table is the leaders' table in the championship.
A ladder ranks every driver who entered that discipline by total points across the season. Ties are broken by best single result, then by the most recent result.
Team Standings are the sum, across all five disciplines, of both team entries' points in each event, after each entry's own conduct multiplier. The table is public, updated after every race date, and posted at whichever venue hosts next. A teammate who finishes fourth cleanly contributes more than one who finishes second by punting someone off.
The two tables can disagree sharply, and a teammate is where they disagree hardest. A Competitor teammate maximises his own Driver Rank at the team's cost: he holds no position for anyone, gives no tow in Speed, and sinks nothing of his own result into a tandem. A Wingman does the reverse: his own ladder looks unremarkable all season while the team's table quietly climbs, because every rival he sat in front of scored less. Neither is wrong; the player chooses which they need by choosing whom to recruit (Recruitment).
Scoring
Classification
Every festival event resolves into a full classification of every entrant. The first eight places come from the final or its equivalent; everyone else is classified behind them.
| Format | How it classifies |
|---|---|
| Grip (Open / Class) and Sprint | Run in heats and a final (How an event runs). Final finishing order gives 1st–8th; non-finalists follow, ordered by heat position (all heat winners not in the final, then all seconds, and so on), ties broken by heat race time. |
| Speed | Pairs are released in sequence; every car is classified by elapsed time. |
| Time Attack and Sector Shootout | Every car runs alone; the timing sheet is the classification. |
| Drag | Qualifying times seed the sixteen fastest into a single-elimination bracket. The winner classifies first, the losing finalist second, the losing semi-finalists third and fourth (by qualifying time), quarter-final losers fifth to eighth, first-round losers ninth to sixteenth, and everyone outside the bracket by qualifying time. |
| Drift | By event score: the driver's own solo score plus the team tandem score (Drift scoring). |
Points
Points are calculated in two stages.
Stage 1 — base points by classified position
| Position | 1st | 2nd | 3rd | 4th | 5th | 6th | 7th | 8th | 9th | 10th | 11th | 12th | 13th | 14th | 15th | 16th | 17th+ |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Base points | 100 | 80 | 65 | 50 | 40 | 30 | 20 | 10 | 8 | 7 | 6 | 5 | 4 | 3 | 2 | 1 | 0 |
Stage 2 — conduct multiplier, judged on the driver's whole event (heat and final, or every run):
| Conduct | Multiplier |
|---|---|
| No contact, no track-limits violations | ×1.5 |
| Minor contact or one track-limits violation | ×1.2 |
| Repeated contact or repeated track-limits violations | ×1.0 |
| Causing a collision that eliminates another competitor | ×0.5 |
| Deliberate ramming, judged by race control | Disqualification, zero points, one-event suspension |
Finishing position decides how much the player earns; conduct decides how much they keep. A clean second (80 × 1.5 = 120) outscores a dirty first (100 × 1.0 = 100). The festival rewards the racer who wins without touching anybody, and makes street habits expensive without ever telling the player to stop being a street racer.
It also answers a problem the city never solves: in the city, a Hostile racer can ram the protagonist at no cost. In the festival, race control is watching, and contact is scored. Live damage makes the same contact cost lap time too (Damage in the festival).
Drift scoring
- Solo score (0–100). Each driver's own run, judged on angle, speed, line and commitment.
- Tandem score (0–100). Each team pair runs one tandem, lead and chase, on track alongside another team's pair, matched by combined solo score. Judges score each pair on synchronisation — proximity through the corners, matched angle, matched transition timing, the chase car mirroring the lead's line without contact. The other pair is pressure, not an opponent: both pairs are scored independently. Both of a team's entries receive the same tandem score.
- Event score = solo score + tandem score. It sets the classification.
A protagonist who qualifies brilliantly alone and runs a ragged tandem with a teammate he barely knows classifies below a driver who did both adequately.
Qualification
The championship has two entry conditions, identical for every team:
- Coverage. In every one of the five disciplines, at least one of the team's two entries — the protagonist or that discipline's teammate — finishes the regular season in the top eight of that discipline's ladder.
- Standings. The team finishes the regular season inside the top eight of the Team Standings.
Only a team registered in all five disciplines can meet the coverage condition. Of the thirty-two teams in a season, eight are registered in all five, Jake's included, so the championship field is at most eight teams (The field).
The two conditions fail for different reasons, and the game does not conflate them. Missing coverage means there was a discipline nobody on the team could carry. Missing the standings means the team as a whole was not good enough. Both are sentences about the people he brought — and both tell him that whom he spent five acts befriending is now a result on a board.
Failing either condition ends the season. The festival closes without the team, a failure screen is shown, and the player returns to the city with no window limit. When ready, the player waits for the next edition and re-registers (Between editions). Re-registration resets festival Rank to zero in every discipline and begins a new regular season, with a roster drawn from whatever Standing the city has produced in the meantime (During a season).
Breadth is demanded of the team, and measured in the protagonist. The city rewards specialisation — a player can dominate the street scene on Ridgeline drift builds alone. The festival refuses that: a team qualifies only if someone on it can carry a grip car, a drag car, a drift car, a speed car and a sprint car. Jake races all five himself, and his Grade is set by the worst of them. The protagonist's father was a driver who could carry everything. The Grade asks whether the son is.
Grades and titles
The festival does not give a driver a title for showing up. It grades drivers, in a vocabulary borrowed from sanctioned motorsport: a grade is something an organising body issues, records, and can withhold.
Competition Grade
Grade is computed from the protagonist's own lowest-placed discipline, not his best. A driver first in Drag and thirtieth in Drift is graded on the Drift number. This is the festival's first statement about him, made before he has driven a lap: you are as good as the thing you are worst at.
| # | Grade | Requirement | What it means |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Applicant | Registered, not yet raced | The team's entry is accepted. Nothing else is. |
| 2 | Provisional | Finished one event in every discipline | Permitted to enter full race days rather than single events. |
| 3 | Novice | Top 20 in all five ladders | No longer treated as a curiosity in the paddock. |
| 4 | Club | Top 16 in all five | Eligible for the higher-class events. Other teams start scouting the roster. |
| 5 | Regional | Top 12 in all five | Named on the standings board rather than listed. |
| 6 | National | Top 8 in all five | Press attention. Sponsorship offers reach the team (Prize money and sponsorship). |
| 7 | Elite | Top 6 in all five | The field stops expecting him to make mistakes. |
| 8 | Qualified | His team meets both qualification conditions | Championship entry. |
| 9 | Festival Champion | Wins the Circuit Final | The last thing the festival has to give. |
Discipline titles
Separate from Grade, earned one discipline at a time, in the ProStreet idiom the festival inherited. Finishing a regular season first in a discipline's ladder earns its title:
| Title | Earned by | Held on arrival by |
|---|---|---|
| Grip King | First in the Grip ladder at season close | Yusuf Demir |
| Drag King | First in the Drag ladder | Lena Brandt |
| Drift King | First in the Drift ladder | Mika Sorvari |
| Speed King | First in the Speed ladder | Oluwaseun Bright |
| Sprint King | First in the Sprint ladder | Renata Aguiló |
The holders are profiled in Cast. Taking a title takes it from someone: a driver who has held it for years, whose whole identity in the paddock is that word.
- A discipline title is not required to qualify. The championship rewards the team that is top eight everywhere over the driver who is first in one place. The specialists hold the crowns; the all-rounders take the championship.
- Holding all five at once is the hardest achievement in the game. It has no mechanical reward, is not required by the story, and is never mentioned by any character. The standings board simply lists one name five times.
The title that is not given
There is no festival title for the protagonist's character: no nickname, no crowd chant, no name the paddock invents for him. The festival calls him by his grade and his position, and nothing else.
This is the contrast the two halves are built on. The city gave him twelve titles, escalating until it simply called him the king (Titles). The festival gives him a grade, a row on a board, and crowns that belong to specialists — and the last thing it gives him is not a title at all, but a contract (The invitation).
The championship
Team leaders
Every team registered in all five disciplines names one leader, who races every discipline as the team's second entry alongside each discipline teammate. Jake is his team's leader. The leader is the only driver who can contest the Circuit Final.
Structure
A fixed sequence of four rounds and a decider, contested only by qualified teams, after the fourteenth race date. The order never varies between playthroughs:
| Round | Discipline | What it decides |
|---|---|---|
| 1 | Drag | Team points; leaders' points |
| 2 | Speed | Team points; leaders' points |
| 3 | Drift | Team points; leaders' points |
| 4 | Sprint | Team points; leaders' points |
| — | Circuit Final | The championship, outright |
Each round is entered by two cars per qualified team: the leader and that discipline's teammate, scored as in the regular season.
- Team points feed the team championship, which decides which team wins the festival.
- Leaders' points feed a leaders' table, which decides only the grid order of the Circuit Final. The leader on top starts on pole.
No team is eliminated in rounds 1–4. Once a team has qualified, its leader starts the Circuit Final.
Teammates race their own race. Standing decides whether they are willing to help the protagonist; Personality decides whether helping is something they are capable of. A Loyal Wingman will bury his own result to protect the protagonist's. A Loyal Competitor will do everything for him except finish behind him. Neither is a bug and neither is disloyalty; the player chose both. The one place a teammate can race Jake directly for a result is the Drag final (Drag).
The Circuit Final is not a points round
- It is a race for team leaders only — one car per qualified team, up to eight cars.
- Grid order comes from the leaders' table. That is the whole advantage a good championship buys.
- The winner of the Circuit Final is the champion. Points from rounds 1–4 do not carry into it and cannot decide it.
A weighted points round could not do this job. Extra points make a final round heavier, not decisive: a large enough lead arrives already champion, and a driver could lose the race and still take the title. Both outcomes are unacceptable for one reason that has nothing to do with balance: the game exists to put Jake on a circuit with the championship live and undecided until he crosses the line. He cannot win the championship without winning that race, and he cannot lose it if he does.
The order exists for the same reason. The championship must end on a closed circuit, in a multi-lap race, because that is the kind of race that killed his father.
The Circuit Final
The leaders. One race. The title.
- Sandreach Motorsport Park, long configuration (Venues). Multi-lap, grandstands full, official timing, marshal posts, race control on the radio. The only permanent circuit in Revada, and the only venue all season that looks like the kind of place his father worked.
- The field is the leader of every qualified team. They are the drivers who carried every discipline for their teams all season, and they are the best all-round drivers in the festival.
- The final lap runs with no commentary, no music, and reduced crowd audio: engine, tyres, and the cars alongside and behind.
The race is not staged, paced or rubber-banded. There is no field pacing, no artificial closing, no scripted last-lap proximity. The opponents drive to the standard every festival AI drives to, which a season has established as high. If the protagonist builds a four-second lead by lap two, he keeps it and wins from the front. If he starts at the back, he has the race to recover.
The drama does not need manufacturing, because the format already produces it. A race for a championship, led on the last lap, with no points to fall back on, is the last lap of his father's race whether it is close or not. Manufacturing closeness on top of that would cost the festival what it has been building since Act 5: that the field is honest and the result is earned.
The protagonist is in his father's position, in the same kind of race, with the same thing at stake — with one difference, and it is on the radio. His Grip teammate is in the paddock and the mechanic assigned to Grip is on the channel. Neither can win the race for him, and the game does not let them. What they do is make it impossible for him to pretend he arrived alone, which is the only thing about this race that does not repeat his father's.
His father died in a crewed, team-entered car, surrounded by people. The protagonist spent five acts believing the lesson was to need nobody.
Losing the Circuit Final
The Circuit Final can be lost, and losing it is a designed part of the experience. If the player loses, the failure screen appears and the player returns to the paddock. The race can be re-entered immediately: the championship is not reset, the season is not reset, and no progress is lost.
This is the one place where the game's retry loop carries meaning. Every other failure costs something outside the protagonist — money, a car, a season, a place on a board. This one does not. The player fails at exactly the thing the protagonist has spent the game avoiding, and then does it again.
The game does not comment on this. No dialogue acknowledges the retries. He simply lines up again.
What happens when he wins is in Ending.