How Championships Work: Rounds, Points and Prize Money

Each championship is a hand-curated list of circuits raced in a set order, three to five rounds long depending on the series. Every series also fixes its own AI difficulty and its own completion purse, so a short easy cup and a long hard one are genuinely different commitments.

When you start a series you land in a waiting room, pick your car, and race round one. Finish it and the lobby lines the next round up on the next circuit automatically. You keep the same lobby the whole way through, which means friends who joined for round one stay on the grid for the rest of the series.

The lineup is not random filler. A mountain series is four passes that punish a clumsy line, an endurance series is three long hauls that reward consistency, and a street series is tight downtown circuits where exits matter more than top speed. Read the circuit list before you pick a car.

The full pool is larger than what you can race today. A subset is in season each week, and the rotation is seeded by the week itself, so every player sees the same featured series and the set stays fixed until the week turns over.

That means two things in practice. If a series you want is in season, race it now, because next week it may be gone. And if you are chasing a specific championship in your history, you wait for the rotation rather than hunting for a way to unlock it.

Each round pays championship points by finishing position, on a familiar top-eight scale: 25 for a win, then 18, 15, 12, 10, 8, 6 and 4 down to eighth. Ninth and below score nothing, and a DNF scores nothing at all.

The gap between first and second is 7 points, but the gap between second and third is only 3. That shape is what makes consistency win championships. Two second places out-score a win plus a fourth, so the risky overtake that might end your race is usually the wrong trade in a series.

Points accumulate on your running standing across every round. At the end of the final round the standings are ordered by total points, and that order is your finishing classification for the series.

Alongside the rotation, each featured championship rolls its own set of race modifiers for the week: animals on track, power-ups, guzzoline, and a grid handicap that reorders the grid against the leaders. The roll is deterministic for the week, so the modifiers are the same for everyone and stay the same across every round of that series.

Check them on the championship card before you start. Power-ups reward aggression and make a points lead less safe. A grid handicap means a strong round one puts you further back on the grid in round two, so the series stays close. Guzzoline adds a fuel constraint that rewards a smooth throttle over a heavy one.

Every driver who took part in the series is paid the completion purse when the final round is scored, and the purse scales with how demanding the series is: a short introductory cup pays a fraction of what a five-round marquee series against the hardest AI pays.

The purse is paid for completing the series, not for winning it, which makes a championship one of the more reliable ways to build up credits for car upgrades. Winning still matters for your final classification, which is snapshotted into your championship history along with your points, your position and the size of the field, and stays there permanently once the lobby is gone.

Pick your car for the whole series, not for round one. A car that is quick on the opening circuit but hopeless on the two that follow will lose you more points than it gains. Look at the full circuit list and choose the best compromise, which usually means favouring handling over outright top speed.

Then race for the finish. Bank points in every round, take the safe line when a move is marginal, and let the drivers who go for everything hand you places when they miss a braking point. If you want the underlying craft, work through the racing line and car tuning first, because both pay off across a whole series rather than one lap.