Pitlane puts you on the front jack of a floodlit pit box, watching the lane from a banked angle as car after car brakes in hard. Nobody stops cleanly. Each car overshoots its painted yellow T, rocks back across it on its suspension, swings through once more and only then settles. Your one job is to drop the jack while the front tyre is sitting on that T, and the interesting part is that it sits there more than once. Every pass over the mark is a legal stop, and every one of them is worth a different amount.
Tap anywhere to drop the jack. Catch the car on its first swing back through the T and the stop is a snap: triple points and your multiplier climbs. The second swing is a slower snap worth double. Let both go and the car settles with its brake light glowing — that stop is safe and keeps your multiplier where it is, but it never grows it. Wait too long and the light flickers, the handbrake slips and the car creeps off the mark. Tapping while the car is short, rocking off the line or creeping away blows the stop and costs one of your three jacks; six clean stops repair one. Cars arrive at different speeds, so you cannot settle into a single rhythm — you read the tyre against the line every time.
Past sixty points the rain arrives and the lane turns slick. Wet cars brake to a dead stop a little short of the T and sit there looking finished, then slide the last few centimetres on with one small swing. Jacking that false settle is the classic mistake. The question stops being whether the car has stopped and becomes whether the tyre is actually on the line. Chill, Normal and Hard change how long the settle window stays open and how hard cars come in, but the opening stops are gentle in every mode.