Why the Same Car Appears Twice in CSR2

Search a car on the record sheet and you will sometimes get two results with the identical name and two different times. It looks like a mistake. It usually is not.

There are 1,073 distinct car names on the sheet and 236 of them appear exactly twice, which means 472 rows — more than a third of the entire database — belong to a repeated name. Nothing appears three times. Here is what actually separates the pairs.

Reason one: star colour

This covers almost all of it. Of the 236 repeated names, 235 have one copy with gold stars and one with purple.

They are the same model with the same tune, recorded at two different fusion states. The purple copy is quicker in the overwhelming majority of cases, by a median of 0.050 seconds. That is small, consistent, and the single clearest measurement of what fusion is worth, because everything else about the two rows is held constant.

So if you find two entries for your car and one is faster, check the stars before you assume the sheet is wrong. The difference is usually a twentieth of a second and usually purple.

Reason two: Elite Customs level

155 names on the sheet carry an Elite Customs tag in brackets, and 74 base models appear at two or more levels — a Toyota Supra at level 0 and level 35, a Shelby GT350 at level 0 and level 36, and so on.

These are not really duplicates, because the name is different: the level is written into it. But they look like duplicates in a search, and the gaps between them are enormous compared with star pairs. A Supra goes from 9.070 at level 0 to 6.856 at level 35 — 2.214 seconds — while a typical star pair moves 0.050.

If you see two entries for the same model and they are seconds apart rather than hundredths, Elite Customs is almost always the reason.

Where the pairs live

The duplicates are not spread evenly. 167 of the 236 pairs are Tier 5 cars, 56 are Tier 4 and 13 are Tier 3. There are none at all in Tiers 1 and 2.

That follows directly from what the pairs are. A pair exists because somebody recorded the car both before and after fusing it, and fusion is overwhelmingly an upper-tier activity — 68% of Tier 5 cars carry purple stars against 11% in Tier 2. Nobody is fusing a Tier 1 hatchback, so no second row ever appears for one.

228 of the 236 pairs have a recorded time on both rows, which is what makes them usable as a comparison. Three pairs have a time on only one side, and those are excluded from every star measurement we publish because there is nothing to compare against.

Reason three: the same car exists in two tiers

Two names on the sheet appear twice with a gap far too large for stars to explain. Both turned out to have the same cause, and it is not a data error.

These models exist in both Tier 4 and Tier 5. The two rows are the same car raced at two different distances, so the times are not comparable and the gap is meaningless as a measure of anything about the car.

This is the one case where a duplicate is not a duplicate at all. If you find two rows seconds apart and neither carries an Elite Customs level, check the tier column before concluding anything.

The real spread between same-tier copies

Compare only pairs that share a tier and the picture is far tighter. The median gap is 0.050 seconds, and the largest is a quarter of a second:

The SF90 Stradale at 0.268 seconds, the 911 Turbo S at 0.252 and the two Audi R8 variants at 0.222 are simply the strongest star responders on the sheet — five times the median, but the right order of magnitude for fusion rather than evidence of a bad row.

How to read a duplicate when you find one

• Check the stars first. Gold against purple explains 235 of the 236 pairs, and the gap will be around 0.050 seconds.
• Check for an Elite Customs level in the name. If one says level 0 and the other says level 35, they are different builds, not duplicates, and the gap will be in seconds.
• If the gap is over a second with no level in the name, check the tier. Two pairs on the sheet are the same model racing in both Tier 4 and Tier 5.
• Use the slower one for planning. It is the more conservative assumption about what your own car will do.

Which copy applies to you

The practical question when you find two rows is which one describes the car sitting in your garage. The answer is almost always the slower one, and people get this wrong in a predictable way.

Both rows are records. Both were set on a fully built car by somebody driving close to perfectly. The purple row additionally assumes the fusion work is complete. So unless your car is both finished and fused, neither number is a prediction of your time — the gold row is simply the less optimistic of two optimistic figures.

Use the gap between them rather than either number on its own. If the two rows are 0.050 seconds apart, that is roughly what completing fusion on that specific car is worth to you. If they are 0.250 apart, you own one of the unusually star-responsive cars and the work is worth considerably more.

Why we leave them in

We could merge the pairs, keep the faster row and present a tidier database of 1,073 cars. We do not, for two reasons.

The first is that the pairs are the measurement. Having the same car recorded twice at two fusion states is the only reason we can say what purple stars are worth, and it is the only controlled comparison this game offers. Collapsing them would throw away the most useful property of the dataset.

The second is that hiding the awkward rows would make the sheet look more authoritative than it is. These are community-compiled times that we host and do not independently verify. When we investigated the two pairs that looked wrong they turned out to be fine, and you are better off seeing that working than being handed a clean number with the uncertainty edited out.

Search any car in the record database and both copies will appear with their stars, their Elite Customs level and their full tune, so you can see for yourself which one applies to you.