The Team

A driver cannot register for the festival. Only a team can.

Registration

Registration opens only when Jake holds every district in Nitroit. The festival is advertised before that (The festival arrives), but no application is accepted from anyone who has not yet taken the whole city. After a season ends, registration reopens with each new edition (Between editions).

The protagonist enters by submitting a full team registration to the organising body: a named roster, a declared car list, and a signed entry for every discipline he intends to contest. An incomplete roster is rejected. There is no solo entry, no guest entry, and no exception for a driver who won everything in the city.

This is the wall he hits the moment he decides to go. He has spent five acts as the best driver in a scene that asked nothing of him but driving, and the festival's first question is who else is coming.

Roster

A legal registration requires ten named people plus the protagonist:

Role	Count	Function
Driver	5 — one per discipline	Races alongside the protagonist in every event of that discipline. Both cars score.
Mechanic	5 — one assigned to each discipline	Prepares, tunes, scrutineers and repairs the cars for that discipline (Mechanics).

The protagonist is the team's leader and its second entry in all five disciplines. He races everything; the teammate races it with him. Only the leader can contest the Circuit Final (Team leaders).

All ten seats must be filled by different named NPCs recruited in the city. The festival supplies no staff, the game generates no filler personnel, and money cannot buy a roster. A player who reaches the end of Act 5 with no relationships has nothing to register and cannot enter.

Recruitment

Recruitment happens in the city, during the campaign, through Standing (Relationships).

Standing	Response to an invitation
Hostile / Unfriendly	Refuses. Will not discuss it.
Neutral	Refuses. Has no reason to care.
Friendly (+1 to +2)	Considers it. Accepts if the salary is met.
Loyal (+3)	Accepts immediately, regardless of salary.

Drivers come from crews; mechanics come from shops. A driver's Standing is built by racing them, talking to them, and not wrecking them. A mechanic's is built by using that shop, over time, for real work (Shops and credit).

Drivers are bound to their culture's discipline. Every recruitable driver has one festival discipline, inherited from where they come from:

Discipline	Drivers from
Drag	Dockline
Grip	The Old Guard; Nadia Ferrante
Drift	Ridge Union; Cass Weller
Speed	Ringrunners
Sprint	Riverside and The Yard

A Ridge Union driver cannot be registered for Drag. There is no cross-training and no substitution for drivers. Meridian supplies no one (Meridian).

Mechanics are not bound. Any mechanic can be assigned to any discipline; each is a specialist in one, and only there do they give their best work (Specialisation). Six shops can supply a mechanic (Cast), so a team chooses five of them and decides where each one goes.

Standing decides who will come. For drivers, Personality decides what they are worth once they do (Personality). For mechanics, Expertise, specialist discipline and Insights do. Choosing between two Friendly drift drivers is choosing between two temperaments.

So the player must build relationships across the whole city. A player who spent the campaign inside one district, however dominant, cannot field a legal roster: the five disciplines' drivers come from six of the seven crews, and the team needs five different mechanics.

The Invitational problem

Nine racers issue Invitationals (Invitationals). Eight are recruitable: the leaders of the six crews that supply festival drivers, and the two unaffiliated drivers. The ninth, Meridian's, is not.

For those eight, the best driver available in a discipline and the hardest one to keep are the same person. The only way to race them for their car is an Invitational, and winning one takes it, costs 2 Standing with them, and costs 1 with their family's mechanic (Family ties).

What it costs depends on order.

• Against someone who has never been Loyal, an Invitational win is expensive: the drop has to be climbed back through the finite, once-per-NPC material Loyal is first made of — and the racer may never get there.
• Against someone already Loyal once, the drop can be talked back up through ordinary dialogue (The ceiling on racing). It costs no material, only time — the time the player spends going back to them instead of doing anything else, in a city where the clock never stops.

A player who wins every Invitational early arrives at registration with an elite garage and a roster of nobodies. A player who builds the relationships first can take the cars and pay for them in time. A player who declines keeps the people and enters in slower cars, having paid REP for every second refusal.

It is the sharpest expression of the protagonist's whole problem: he is extremely good at taking things from people, and the one thing he needs cannot be taken — only earned, and then kept.

Salaries

Every registered team member draws a salary for the season from the player's money, deducted per scheduled race date.

Factor	Effect on salary
The NPC's rank within their own crew	Higher-ranked racers cost more
Standing at Loyal	Waived entirely — they are not doing it for the money
Discipline scarcity	A driver for a discipline where the player has few contacts commands more

A roster of Friendly professionals is expensive enough to compete with the five-car budget, and the player will be back in the city earning between race dates to cover both (Time). A roster of Loyal friends costs nothing — the largest economic advantage in the game.

Meridian sponsorship. A Meridian contact at Loyal Standing will underwrite the team's salaries in full for a season. It is the only way to cover a roster of paid professionals completely without street winnings, and the one thing The Heights is good for beyond hypercars.

Relationships are the game's real currency, and this is where it is spent.

Prize money and sponsorship

The festival pays, but it is not a place to make money. It is where the story ends; the city is where the money is made.

Source	What it pays
Event purses	Every event pays the team by classified position. Across a race date, purses are always smaller than that date's salary bill.
Sponsorship offers	From the National grade on (Competition Grade), sponsors offer livery deals that pay a fixed amount per race date. They cover part of the salaries, never all of them.
Championship purse	The largest single payment in the game, paid once, to the team that wins the Circuit Final.

Festival money goes into Jake's own funds like any other winnings, and stays there after the game ends (After the championship). It never touches the inherited account (The money).

Teammates' cars

Teammates bring their own cars. A recruited driver arrives with the car they raced in the city; it is their property and responsibility, and the player does not fund it. It must still pass scrutineering for the discipline, which is what the discipline's mechanic is for, and its quality is whatever that NPC's quality is.

The player may instead lend a teammate a car from their own garage, and often should for a discipline where their contact is weak. That car is then unavailable to the player for the whole race date.

During a season

The roster is frozen for the duration of a season. Once registration is submitted, no teammate or mechanic can be replaced, added, dropped or reassigned until the season ends, whatever happens to the relationship underneath.

Standing itself is not frozen. It keeps moving in the city during the windows between race dates — including downward, including for people on the roster. A drift teammate the player stops visiting decays from Loyal to Friendly mid-season (Decay), and the tandem scores fall with him (Drift) until the player spends window time bringing him back.

Festival events do not move Standing. Contact in a festival event and dialogue in the paddock leave it untouched; only the city changes it.

A failed season is a second chance. A player who fails to qualify stays in the city with no window limit, repairs what was neglected, and re-registers with a roster drawn from whatever Standing the city has produced in the meantime (Qualification).

How teammates score and behave in the championship is in Rank and championship.