Choose a car
Difficulty is how much the vehicle tells you, not just how fast it is. The Pico talks constantly; the Zenith barely says a word. Each one has a button to hear it first.
Choose a circuit
Level one is two straights and two open curves. Level five is ice, or rain, or both hands full for a whole lap.
Race settings
Race
Driving controls
Double tap and hold a control to keep it pressed. This is the mode to use with VoiceOver or TalkBack switched on.
Focus is in the car. Screen readers switch to focus mode here automatically.
- Speed
- 0
- Gear
- 1
- Lap
- 1 / 3
- Position
- 1st
- Best lap
- --:--.---
- Last lap
- --:--.---
- Next corner
- —
- Surface
- asphalt
Order
Track map
Message log
Paused
The race is held exactly where it is. Nothing is lost.
This is an ordinary page, so browse it however you normally would. Escape goes straight back to the race.
Touch test
Put your thumbs on the panel below and move them. This reports exactly what the browser is telling the game, so if the controls are not responding we can see whether the touches are arriving at all or arriving and being misread.
Nothing yet.
What came through
Result
Race other people
Connecting…
Nothing to race on
Racing other people needs the game's own server to answer at /ws on this domain. It is not answering, so there is nothing to create a race on and no point letting you try.
Worth checking, in order:
- The Worker is deployed. From the
cloudflarefolder,npm run deploy. - The page address and the server address are the same domain. If the page is on one host and the Worker on another, the game will not find it by itself.
- The address uses wss and not ws, if the page is on https. A secure page cannot open an insecure connection, and browsers report that badly.
npm run tailshows whether the connection attempt is arriving at all.
Join a race with a code
Easier still: ask whoever is hosting for their invite link. Opening it joins you without a code at all.
Open races anyone can join
Only races on the slower connection appear here. Everything else is joined by code or by invite link.
Connection settings
This sorts itself out and you should not need to touch it. The game connects to the server it was served from. If that server is not answering, it says so rather than quietly racing on something worse.
Times and ghosts
A ghost is a recorded lap replayed beside you. It is placed in 3D exactly like a live rival, so you hear where you are losing time rather than reading it afterwards.
Sound tour
Each item runs the real audio engine, not a recording of it. Start with the mix check and set your sliders there.
Settings
The mix matters more here than in most games, because the mix is the interface. Push up whichever channel you are navigating by.
Settings are in groups. Open a group to change what is inside it; everything stays closed until you ask for it, so there is less to walk past.
Driver
Mix
Cues
Phone and tablet
No web page can take direct touch while VoiceOver or TalkBack is running, so the two modes really are different games. With your screen reader on, driving uses on-screen buttons you hold with double-tap-and-hold. With it off, the app speaks for itself and you get two-thumb steering, which is the way this is meant to be played. Both use the same menus.
Perspective
In chase view, steer towards your own engine note to bring the car back to the middle of the road. Turn into a corner too late and the car sound slides to the outside before you have actually run wide.
Driving
Assists also govern how badly an accident can go: Rookie tops out at a heavy hit and never loses you a recovery, Pro gets the full model.
Voices
Voices marked "recommended" are the modern neural ones your system reports. They hold up far better at racing speech rates than the older built-in voices.
Audio output
This routes the game's own audio. Speech synthesis is rendered by the operating system and cannot be redirected from a web page, so if callouts come out of the wrong device, send them to your screen reader instead and set the device there.
How to play
You are driving a track you cannot see. Five things tell you where you are: the engine note, the tyres, the brakes, the corner cues, and the world going past.
Driving
| Up / W | Accelerate |
|---|---|
| Down / S | Brake |
| Left Right | Steer. Held inputs build progressively, so a tap is a nudge. |
| H | Handbrake. Hold it to stop harder, or to unstick the back end. |
| Space | Horn. Every car has its own. |
| I U | The drive selector, one notch at a time. I moves towards drive, U back towards park. The gate runs park, reverse, neutral, drive, sport, exactly as a real one does, and it stops at both ends rather than looping round. Manuals have no park or sport, only reverse, neutral and drive. You start in park in an automatic and in neutral in a manual, so this is the first thing you touch. |
| J L | Paddle shift down and up, in manual |
| K | Swap between automatic and manual shifting |
| V | Swap between chase and cockpit perspective |
| R | Put the car back on the track, facing forwards |
| / | Read the controls out |
| Escape | Pause. This leaves the race screen and opens an ordinary page you can browse normally, with resume, restart, end the session and quit on it. Escape again returns to the race. |
A gamepad works too: left stick steers, right trigger accelerates, left trigger brakes, A is the handbrake, X is the horn, and the shoulder buttons change gear.
Status keys
| 1 | Speed, gear, revs |
|---|---|
| 2 | Position, and the gaps in front and behind |
| 3 | Lap number, this lap's time, total time |
| 4 | Next corner: number, direction, severity, distance, target speed |
| 5 | Last lap, best lap, ghost's lap |
| 6 | Where you are across the road, and what you are driving on |
| 7 | Damage, grip, slip, whether you are in the tow |
| 8 | The order, top six |
| 9 | Circuit and car details |
| 0 | Everything at once |
Cues, and switching them off
| C | Corner cues on or off |
|---|---|
| ; | Edge beacon on or off |
| P | Pace notes on or off |
| M | Show or hide the track map |
| [ ] | Master volume down and up |
Reading the road
Corner cues pip towards the next corner. They are panned to the side it turns, they get faster as it arrives, and their pitch tells you about your braking: steady means you are on the curve, rising and hard means you are carrying too much speed. A single high tick marks the apex.
The edge beacon is silent while you are near the middle of the road, then chimes towards the side you are drifting to, with the pitch and the rate both climbing as the edge nears. The kerb has its own falling two-note figure an octave down. After that comes grass, gravel, sand or ice, and each sounds completely different, which is the point.
The drive selector sits on I and works like a real one. Neutral lets the engine rev freely, which is how you check an engine you cannot see. Reverse is refused above walking pace and capped at 27 km/h, and the working vehicles have a reversing alarm. Sport appears only where the gearbox could actually offer it, and holds gears to the limiter. K is separate: it decides whether you or the car chooses the gears.
The handbrake on H locks the rear wheels and nothing else. Locked tyres brake worse than rolling ones, so it will not stop you faster than the pedal, and it is not meant to. It is for rotating the car into a slow corner, and how far it rotates depends on how much lock you have on. The lever clicks so you always know its state.
The brakes talk too. Pad squeal is nearly a musical note, and its pitch falls with the discs, so the descent tells you how much speed you have actually scrubbed rather than making you infer it from the engine. It is deliberately tonal so it is never confused with the broadband hiss of a sliding tyre. Close to locking, a judder comes in underneath it. Every vehicle sounds different here, and not by hand: pad resonance falls as the disc grows, the rumble grows with the mass being stopped, and the friction material decides how tonal it is. Carbon on the prototype sings up near 4 kHz; the van's drums groan at 300; the bus has air brakes that hiss on release.
On a phone or tablet
Set How you drive to touch in Settings, then choose who does the talking.
With VoiceOver or TalkBack on, driving uses on-screen buttons. Double tap and hold accelerate, brake or a steering button to keep it pressed. Everything else is a single button: horn, gear changes, drive selector, and five status buttons.
With them off, the app speaks for itself and takes the whole screen. Hold the phone in landscape. Your left thumb steers and your right thumb is the pedals: push up for throttle, pull down to brake. Wherever you first put a thumb becomes the centre, so you never have to find a fixed spot on a piece of glass you cannot see. In the menus, swipe right and left to move, double tap to choose, swipe up and down to change a value, and two-finger tap to stop it talking, which is deliberately the same as VoiceOver.
| Left thumb, drag | Steer. Left and right from wherever you first touched. |
|---|---|
| Right thumb, drag | Throttle up, brake down. |
| Tap a corner | Top left position and gaps, top right lap and times, bottom left speed and gear, bottom right next corner. |
| Double tap | Horn |
| Two fingers, held | Handbrake |
| Two-finger tap | Pause |
| Three-finger tap | Read everything out |
| Two-finger swipe left | Stop talking |
| Two fingers, push up or pull down | The selector, like a lever: away from you towards drive, back towards park |
| Two-finger swipe right | Repeat your speed and gear |
| Three-finger swipe up or down | Change gear, in manual |
When it goes wrong
Contact is graded by how fast you are travelling into the barrier, not by your speed. Brushing a wall almost parallel at 200 is a scrape; arriving at a barrier at 60 pointing straight at it is an accident. A scrape costs paint and a little time. A heavy hit spins you and takes a second or so to gather up. A real crash stops you, and marshals put you back on the road after a few seconds, counted down aloud. You are never stranded, and R always cuts the wait short.
Damage does not just make you slower. A punctured tyre thumps once per wheel revolution, bent bodywork adds wind roar, and a damaged engine misfires, so your rev reading stops being trustworthy. All three are still speed cues; they are simply worse ones. Status key 7 tells you what is broken and which end of the car is sliding.
A car stopped ahead is called as a local yellow, with a pip panned to where it is sitting, so you hear it coming instead of finding it.
Pace notes are rally-style. Lower numbers are tighter: hairpin, one, two, three, four, five, six. "Left four, into right two long" means an easy left, then almost immediately a tight, long right.
Rivals are placed in real 3D. On headphones you can hear a car sitting on your inside line, and you can hear the moment it clears your front wing. Nothing announces it — that is the game.
The slipstream is audible as a drop in wind noise when you tuck in behind someone. Stay in it down the straight, then pull out.
Learning a circuit
Landmarks sit at fixed points and are placed in 3D like everything else. On Kranji Hills the waterfall is always just before the second hairpin. On Riverside the tunnel changes the voice of the whole car for four hundred metres. Once you know a track by its landmarks you can stop relying on the cues, and that is where the lap time is.