How to play
- Pick a mode. Race is 3 laps against 5 rivals, starting from the back of the grid. Time trial is an out lap to build up speed, then 5 timed laps on your own, chasing the ghost of your best lap. Championship runs all 6 tracks in a row and scores every race 10, 8, 6, 4, 2 and 1 points.
- Pick a track, a difficulty and a car. The rivals drive the same car as you, so the difficulty is only how well they drive: Easy rivals lift off on the straights and make more mistakes; Hard ones carry more speed through the corners and rarely go wide. Tune the car before you start if you like.
- Wait for the lights. Five red lights come on one by one, then go out together: that’s the start. You can rev the engine while you wait, but the car won’t move before the lights go out.
- Drive. Accelerate with the up arrow or W, brake with down or S (hold it at a standstill to reverse), steer with the left and right arrows or A and D, and pull the handbrake with Space. On a phone, hold Gas and tap the arrows. If the car gets stuck or turned round, press R (or Y on a controller) to be put back on the track.
Position, lap, race time and best lap are shown at the top; the minimap in the corner shows where everyone is. In a time trial the gap to your ghost replaces the position: green when you’re ahead of your best lap at that point of the track, red when you’re behind. The results screen lists every car’s best lap and gap, and your own lap times.
Driving tips for each surface
- Asphalt grips well. Brake in a straight line before a corner, turn in, and get back on the power as the road opens up. Late braking into a slide costs more time than it gains.
- Kerbs (the striped edges on corners) are almost as grippy as the road, so use them to straighten the corner.
- Grass, sand, snow and cobbles slow the car down hard and let it slide. Two wheels off is a small loss; four wheels off on the Desert Canyon sand can halve your speed. The Thistle Rally is built for these and loses much less.
- Ice on the Snowy Pass has about a third of the grip of asphalt. Brake before it, keep the steering gentle, and don’t touch the handbrake unless you want to spin.
- Oil slicks on the City Night and Harbour Docks tracks have almost no grip at all. Drive around them, or cross them straight and off the throttle.
- Drifting: a tap of the handbrake as you turn in swings the back out. Hold the slide for about three quarters of a second and the bar under the speed fills; straighten up with the throttle on for a short drift boost.
The tracks
- Meadow Circuit
- Fast sweepers through the fields, grass run-off, a long start straight.
- City Night
- Square corners between the blocks, narrow streets, oil on the road.
- Desert Canyon
- Rock walls, soft sand either side and a tight hairpin at the top.
- Snowy Pass
- Switchbacks over the pass, deep snow banks and icy stretches.
- Harbour Docks
- Along the quay between container stacks, cobbles and slick oil.
- Figure-8 Bridge
- An evening stadium figure-8: the lap crosses itself over a bridge.
Each lap passes 16 checkpoints in order. Barriers line every track, so there are no shortcuts, and a lap only counts when the car has driven through all of them, whichever way it got back on the road.
Tuning and unlocking cars
You start with the Sprout, a forgiving hatchback. Finish a championship on any difficulty for the Fern GT, win one on Normal or Hard for the Thistle Rally, and win one on Hard for the Hornet V8, the fastest and most tail-happy car. The tuning screen has three sliders: downforce (top speed against grip), gearing (top speed against acceleration) and steering (stable against quick). Top speed and the 0–100 km/h time under them are measured: the game drives the car flat out down a straight with its own physics each time you move a slider. Grip is the tyres’ rated cornering grip, calculated from the settings.
Ghosts and sharing
The physics runs at a fixed 120 steps a second and gives the same result from the same inputs every time, in every browser. So a ghost is just the inputs of your best lap plus the car’s state when the lap began, a couple of kilobytes, and replaying it drives the lap exactly again. When you share a time trial, the link carries that ghost if it fits, and your friend can race against it with “Race their ghost”. Before showing a shared ghost, the game checks that it starts on the start line with a speed the car could really have, replays it, and only accepts it if it completes a lap in exactly the time the link claims. Their ghost stays as the one to chase for the whole session, even after you beat it. A time-trial link that’s too long to carry the ghost still opens, marked as unverified.
Everything is kept in this browser only: best laps, ghosts, tuning, unlocked cars and a championship in progress, which you can leave and continue later. Nothing is uploaded.
More to play: the golf game has a new course every day. Racing with a controller or a wheel that pulls to one side? Check it with the controller tester or the steering wheel tester, and see how fast you react to a start light with the reaction time test.