The Season

Where events are held is in Revada. How city time is spent between race dates is in Time.

The field

A festival season fields thirty-two registered teams: sixty-four cars.

Not every team contests every discipline. A team registers per discipline, and most register in two or three, so the specialists the protagonist meets in Drag are largely not the ones he meets in Drift. A discipline typically draws around thirty entrants.

Eight teams are registered in all five disciplines: Jake's, and seven rival teams, each with a leader who races everything (Team leaders). Only these eight can qualify for the championship. The seven rival all-discipline teams are built to contend, so at least three of them qualify in every season and the Circuit Final never has fewer than four cars.

How an event runs

Grip (Open and Class) and Sprint run in heats when entries exceed a grid:

Stage	Structure
Heats	Entrants are split into groups of eight. Each heat runs the full event.
Final	Eight cars: the best heat performers — heat winners first, then heat seconds, and so on, with ties broken by heat race time. With four heats, the top two of each heat go through.
Classification	The final sets places 1–8; everyone else is classified behind them (Classification).

• Both of a team's cars can appear in the same heat. Seeding separates teammates only in the Drag bracket.
• Drag runs qualifying and a sixteen-car bracket; Drift runs solos and tandems; Speed, Time Attack and Sector Shootout have no grid and classify by time (Running order).

The season

Race dates	14 across about three and a half months of in-game time
Events per date	2 to 4, from different disciplines
Events per discipline, per season	8 to 11
City window between dates	6 to 8 in-game days, two of them travel (Time)
Championship	4 rounds plus the Circuit Final, after date 14 (Championship)

Eight to eleven events per discipline make qualification survivable and the Grade system meaningful: a bad round is recoverable; a bad discipline is not.

Race length

Festival races are short — a deliberate calibration, not an omission.

Discipline	Length
Grip — Open / Class	3 to 6 laps, by circuit
Grip — Time Attack	One timed lap, one attempt, plus an out-lap
Grip — Sector Shootout	One full lap, sectors timed independently
Sprint	8 to 20 minutes point to point — the long format
Drag	Seconds per run
Drift	Solo runs and one tandem across one session
Speed	5 to 12 minutes point to point — the other long format

Nothing runs for an hour and nothing requires a stop. A driver rolls out of the paddock, races, and rolls back in.

What strategy means

Strategy is a set of decisions made at speed, inside the race, with no menu open. That is all of it:

Decision	Where it comes up
When the tyres are ready	The opening lap of every circuit event. Push on cold rubber and lose the car; wait too long and lose the position.
How hard to lean on the tyres	Long Sprints and Speed runs, where fade is gradual and the driver decides whether the last third matters more than the first.
When to spend the brakes	Long formats only. Heavy braking every corner fades them; the driver chooses which corners are worth it.
Attack or hold	Every wheel-to-wheel event. Contact costs points through the conduct multiplier, so an overtake that would be free in the city is a calculation here.
Slipstream	Speed and the long Sprints: when to sit in it, when to pull out, whether to give it to a teammate.
Committing in a tandem	Drift: how close is close enough before the contact risk outweighs the synchronisation score.
Damage management	Everywhere. Live damage does not repair mid-event, so a driver carrying a broken splitter decides whether to keep racing it or settle for the classification he has.

Strategy is never: choosing a stint plan before the start; deciding when to pit (there are no pits); managing a fuel number; reading telemetry; watching the race from a timing screen.

The test the festival sets: can the player hold a race together from green to chequered, in a car that is being worn down, against people who do not make mistakes, without touching anybody? In the city the answer never mattered. Here it is the whole score.