Rehearse with race settings, not free-drive ones
Free drive and the timed modes use the same car model, but four things change the moment a time trial, duel or weekly or monthly race starts. Lane assist and cruise are switched off. The clock is fixed at midday and the weather at clear. The 4–10 traffic cars are not loaded. And one steering rule changes: in free drive with Lane assist on, the game lifts the cap on how fast the car may turn, so it follows every bend at any speed. In a race the cap is back, and a car that arrives too fast runs wide.
So a free lap with assist on teaches you the scenery, not the road. To rehearse a time trial, press L to turn assist off, press G until the weather reads Clear, and leave cruise (X) off. Rain is worth avoiding in rehearsal for a second reason: it takes 28% off tyre grip, for cornering and braking alike, and races are never wet.
Two kinds of road
Medal times come from a model driver that holds a fixed share of the car's top speed and slows only where a bend just ahead forces it. I ran that model at gold pace on every road and measured how much of each loop is bend-limited, meaning the curve rather than the pace sets the speed. In the Midnight Coupe the share runs from nothing to more than two thirds:
- Great Wall Ridgeway: 69% of the loop
- Atlantic Ocean Road: 53%
- Amalfi Coast Drive and Milford Sound Road: 48%
- Laurentian Maple Road: 47%
- Lofoten Aurora Fjord: 14%; Monument Valley Sunset: 9%
- Uyuni Mirror Flats: 0%. No bend there asks even the Coupe to drop below gold pace.
Why the road type changes your lap
The two groups need different laps. On Uyuni or Monument Valley the gold time is a throttle-and-tidiness test: stay flat out and keep the car's centre away from the edge. On Great Wall or Amalfi it is a braking test, and the medals sit close together. In the Coupe, bronze on Amalfi is only 16% slower than gold (1:57.2 against 1:41.4); on Uyuni it is 38% slower (2:45.7 against 2:00.0).
On a bendy road one overshoot into the penalty zone can cost a whole medal, so a clean lap a little below the limit beats a fast lap with one mistake. On an open road you can afford a scruffy bend, but not a single lift you didn't need.
Two kinds of car
The same road asks different things of different cars, because a slow car rarely reaches a speed a bend objects to. The Marshmallow Mini tops out at 130 km/h but has the second-best tyre grip in the garage (1.15, behind the Coupe's 1.2). At gold pace it is bend-limited on only 3–21% of most loops; Great Wall (40%) and Maple (29%) are the exceptions. The Cotton Camper, with far less grip but a 110 km/h ceiling, falls in a similar range. In these cars a medal comes mostly from never lifting off.
The Coupe and the Sunset Roadster are the opposite case: fast enough that long stretches of most roads are capped by the bends, so gold depends on where you brake and how cleanly you turn in.
The ten cars by the numbers
The garage shows mass, power, torque and drivetrain, plus 1–5 bars. Two figures that decide a timed lap sit in the car data instead: tyre grip, which caps cornering and braking, and brake force, which on several cars is the weaker of the two. Top speed, grip and best straight-line braking on dry asphalt:
- Midnight Coupe: 190 km/h, grip 1.2, 1.14 g
- Sunset Roadster: 185 km/h, grip 1.1, 1.05 g
- Riviera GT: 175 km/h, grip 1.05, 0.82 g
- Maple Wagon: 160 km/h, grip 0.95, 0.80 g
- Mint Volt: 155 km/h, grip 1.0, 0.90 g
- Forest Trekker (all-wheel drive): 150 km/h, grip 0.85, 0.74 g
- Harvest Pickup: 145 km/h, grip 0.8, 0.67 g
- Marshmallow Mini: 130 km/h, grip 1.15, 0.83 g
- Pebble Bug: 125 km/h, grip 0.9, 0.70 g
- Cotton Camper: 110 km/h, grip 0.75, 0.57 g
What the numbers mean at the wheel
The Riviera GT corners almost like the Roadster but stops far worse, so its braking points belong much earlier than its handling bar suggests. The Mini and the Camper run out of brake before they run out of tyre, which is why the Mini's stopping power is unchanged in rain. The Mint Volt slows hardest when you lift: its regenerative coast pulls 0.68 m/s², against 0.38–0.55 for the other cars, so in the Volt a lift does part of the braking for you.
What Corner · Aim really tells you
During a timed lap a line reads Corner …m · Aim …km/h: the tightest bend ahead and a speed for it. That speed is worked out from the car's grip alone. The game's cornering model then takes some grip away as weight shifts onto the outer tyres, more in tall cars. By that model, Aim lands within 3% of the car's real steady-state limit: fractionally under it in the Coupe, Roadster and Mint Volt, and 2–3% over it in the Camper, Forest Trekker and Mini.
So treat Aim as the edge, not a comfortable target, and arrive a touch under it in the tall cars. Be off the brake by the time you turn. When you brake and steer together, the anti-lock model splits one grip budget between them, so the cornering limit drops while the pedal is down. The car does not spin; it runs wide, towards the edge where the penalty clock starts.
Keys, touch and sticks steer differently
Keyboard and touch steering are on-off inputs that the game ramps in, and the ramp slows with speed. From about 108 km/h up, a held key needs roughly half a second to reach full lock in the Coupe or Roadster, 0.38 s in the Mini, and close to 0.9 s in the Camper, Pickup and Forest Trekker. Letting go re-centres more than three times faster. Full lock itself shrinks with speed, from about 25° at 30 km/h to 14° at 100 km/h.
In the heavy cars, then, start the turn earlier and hold the key instead of tapping, since each short tap reaches only part of the lock you asked for. A gamepad stick or racing wheel skips the ramp and is followed closely. The triggers also give graded gas and brake, where the arrow keys give all or nothing.
Use the live lines, then the review
Before GO, the medal line shows your target: the next medal you don't yet hold in this car on this road, or gold once you have all three. While you drive, it shows how far ahead of or behind that medal's pace you are at this exact point. The sector callouts at one third and two thirds compare against your own best splits when you have a best lap in this car, and against the medal pace only when you don't.
Your best lap and ghost are replaced only by a faster time, and the result compares this run with the previous best. A line such as Most time lost in S2 names the sector where you lost most, if it is at least 0.05 s, and shows the off-road share in brackets when part of it was penalty. Sector analysis traces both runs and counts Hard brakes: moments when you shed at least 5 m/s², about half a g, logged at most once a second. Run again, focus on S{n} restarts the whole lap with the same car and road, so drive the other sectors as you did before.
Duels: what changes
A duel uses the same physics and drops everything personal: no ghost, no medal line, no sector-versus-best callouts. Your best is kept per road, car and level, and it is replaced only by a better finishing place, or a faster time in the same place. Rivals never press harder than three-quarters throttle, so at full throttle you out-accelerate them away from the line and out of every slow bend. After a loss the result tells you how many seconds you were behind the car directly ahead. After a win, a Try Sport → or Try Pro → button reruns the same road and car one level up.
Series races and racing friends
Weekly and monthly races are time trials on a fixed road and car. They read and write the same local best lap, ghost and medals as an ordinary time trial with that pairing. Practising the pairing in Time trial therefore gives you a ghost to chase in the series run, and a good series lap can earn the medal too. The rotation draws on 20 of the 21 roads; Dutch Tulip & Windmill Road is left out.
Between friends, medal times depend only on road and car, so gold in the Pebble Bug on Biei Patchwork Hills means the same lap on every device. Ghosts and medals stay in your browser. What travels is Share challenge, which carries the road, the car and your time.
Play it yourself
