Racing

Sprint, circuit, off-road and drag racing with a proper tablet app behind it — official cash races, player-built community routes, and buy-in pots for the ones the law wouldn't sanction.

Finding a race

Racing lives in an app on your tablet (a keybind may also be bound on your server — check with staff if you’re not sure). The hub lists every public race — official, government-sanctioned events alongside routes built by other players — showing the type, distance, how many checkpoints or laps, and the route’s version. If you spot a “Legacy — needs re-edit” badge, that route hasn’t been brought up to the current course format yet and joining is disabled until its owner fixes it.

Pick a race and you can either drop a GPS waypoint to navigate there yourself, or join to enter the server-run staging area directly. Some official start lines also have a prompt you can interact with in the world, which opens that race’s detail or current staging straight away — handy if you’re driving past and don’t want to dig through the app.

The tablet closes automatically the moment a race actually launches — don’t expect to check standings mid-corner.

Staging and the grid

Nothing starts until everyone’s ready. Staging checks that you (and your whole party, if you’re in one) are physically near the start line and sat in a vehicle — a solo racer auto-readies once that’s confirmed, but only the party leader can pull the trigger to launch. Once launch fires, cars are placed on the grid, each of you has a short window to confirm your car is in position, and a countdown runs to green. If anyone fails to confirm in time they’re dropped rather than the whole grid being held up, and if the grid itself fails to validate the launch is cancelled outright — nobody starts short-handed.

If the race pins a specific vehicle model (a one-make or “spec” race), everyone’s own car gets left parked and you’re all put into identical vehicles for the grid — the server checks you’re genuinely in that model before the race counts you.

Race formats

Checkpoints work in two flavours: finish and lap gates are a pair of posts you have to actually drive between, while intermediate checkpoints are simple radius zones you can approach from any direction. Everything is validated order-by-order on the server, so cutting a corner or skipping a gate gets rejected and your progress rolls back rather than quietly letting you through. The in-race HUD keeps you honest with position, lap count, a mini speedo, distance to the next gate, and a wrong-way warning if you’re pointed the wrong direction.

Finish and you get a results card on the spot — your place, your time, whether it’s a personal best, and any payout.

Official races vs community pots

There are two very different economies running side by side:

• Official, legal races are government-sanctioned and pay a fixed cash schedule by finishing position — a decent purse for the podium and a smaller flat amount for everyone else who finishes. There’s no entry cost and no police interest.
• Community races — built by other players — carry no official prize pot at all. Instead, entrants put up a buy-in before the race starts; the money’s held safely until launch, and if anyone can’t cover their share the whole thing’s called off and everyone gets their stake back. However the pot is split — winner-takes-all or shared out — is set by whoever created the race, and some take a cut for the house.

Either way, a race only pays anything — cash or driving XP — once it has enough real people racing in it. Fall short of that and it still runs as a proper time trial: your time is recorded to the leaderboard and you get personal-best feedback, it just doesn’t move any money. If a payout ever fails to land for some reason, it’s queued and retried rather than lost — you’ll be told either way. See Money & Banking for how credits and debits generally work.

Parties and team racing

Invite people nearby (or by their server ID) into a race party before you queue up — invites don’t hang around forever, so get an answer quickly. The party leader chooses the race and can flip on team scoring, which locks every member into a team bucket before the party’s allowed to launch. With teams on, live standings can show team rankings instead of individual ones, ranked by each team’s best-placed racer. Party size and team counts are capped, so plan your crew accordingly.

Building your own route

Fancy designing something yourself? Open the in-world creator from the tablet’s “create race” option. Drop a single point to place a start, finish, or lap gate, then use your scroll wheel to rotate it and left/right to set how wide the gate is — you’ll see both posts previewed live. Ordinary checkpoints are just a point with an adjustable radius. A checklist panel lets you select, move, resize, reorder, delete, or undo anything you’ve placed, and you can run a local test lap that never pays out — it’s there purely to check the route flows properly. Non-staff creators get temporary noclip while building so you can fly the route from above.

Saving charges a small publish fee once your course validates (refunded if the save itself fails), and there’s a minimum course length plus a cap on how many races each character can have published at once — so it’s worth polishing a route before you commit it.

Anyone can file a report against a race if something’s off with it; staff can hide, remove, or restore a race from there.

Legal vs illegal — the risk

Official races are entirely legal and carry zero police exposure. Community races that aren’t run under the official banner are treated as illegal street racing: starting one carries a real chance of tripping a police alert, so TEPD may well turn up looking for the source of engine noise and squealing tyres. Weigh that against the buy-in pot before you commit your car and your cash to an unsanctioned run — see Evading the Law if things go loud. Keep your car properly fuelled and maintained beforehand; a race is a bad place to discover you’re running low.