Quarter Mile
Two to four cars on a standing quarter mile, seen from the driver's seat. Hold the throttle while the tree comes down so the needle is where you want it at green, and the car leaves by itself; from there it is five gears, one shot of nitrous, and whatever the tyres will take. Three runs, and the most points takes the match.
The tree
- Everybody stages together. Two seconds later the tree starts, and where it starts is drawn from the seed: somewhere between six tenths of a second and one and two fifths, so nobody can leave by counting.
- Three ambers come down half a second apart, and green follows the last amber half a second later.
- Hold the throttle while the tree comes down and the revs climb. Let go and they fall away again. Whatever is on the clock at green is what you leave on.
- There is no red light and you cannot jump the start. The car is held until green whatever you do, and it leaves on the first instant at or after green with the throttle down. Your reaction is how long after green you were ready, and it is never a penalty.
- Leave above 6,200 rpm and the tyres let go: the more revs over that, the longer the wheelspin. Leave below 3,000 and the engine bogs for six tenths of a second. The band between them is the launch window, and the dial paints it.
- The needle stops at 8,000. Sit on the limiter while you wait and it holds you there, which is a long way above the window.
The run
- A quarter mile is 402.336 metres, and a good run takes about eleven and a quarter seconds.
- The throttle looks after itself once the car has left. From green onwards the only thing you do is change gear, and fire the nitrous if you want it.
- Five gears. Change up with the up arrow, Enter, a digit, or by tapping a gear on the dashboard; on a phone the lower right of the picture is the next gear under a thumb. A change takes just over a tenth of a second, and nothing you press during it is taken.
- The strip across the dashboard turns green at 6,600 rpm. That is the shift light, and green always means change up.
- One shot of nitrous a run, and it lasts two seconds. It is worth half as much drive again, but the tyres cap what reaches the road, so a shot fired in first is a shot wasted.
- A run that has taken twenty seconds is over where it stands. That is long enough that only a car that never really left will reach it.
- Your elapsed time runs from green, not from when you left, so a slow reaction costs you the race but not your time. The trap speed is how fast you crossed the line.
How a match ends
- Three runs, with five seconds between them. Each run pays points by finishing order: at two cars the winner takes two and the loser one, at four the winner takes four and the last one takes one.
- A car that never left the line scores nothing for that run.
- The most points after three runs wins the match. Level at the top is a draw.
- A player who resigns is out of the match. At two players the other one wins; at three or four the run in progress is started again for the players left, and the runs already scored stand.
- Every seat is on the clock the whole time, so the site's move deadline of five minutes is only a dead man's switch: if nothing at all happens for that long the match is abandoned and nobody is rated. A player who drops out is covered by the bot within half a second, and forfeits their seat after two whole runs away.
Worth knowing before you start
- The server runs every car and decides everything. Your own car is drawn a moment ahead of the last thing the server said, so the pedal answers in the frame you pressed it.
- Your reaction is measured in your own browser, from the amber you saw. When you press, the page tells the server where on the tree you pressed, and the server puts your pedal there rather than where the message happened to arrive. Up to three tenths of a second of delay costs you nothing at all; a link slower than that loses you the difference, and the page says so when it happens.
- Nothing in a lane depends on any other lane. You cannot block anybody, nobody can block you, and there is no slipstream: the only car you are driving against is the clock.
- Quarter Mile needs a live connection. If your browser or network cannot open one the page says so rather than offering a race that cannot be driven.
- If the player whose machine is holding the race drops out, the run in progress starts again from the tree and the runs already scored stand.
- The bot drives at one of three strengths, drawn per match from the seed. All three read the shift light like a person does and take a moment to act on it; the weakest one hardly aims at the launch window at all, revs when it feels like it, and wastes its nitrous in first.
Lanes never touch, so a lane is decided entirely by its own driver, and that is what lets the server honour your pedal where you pressed it rather than where the network delivered it. Every run is stored as the inputs that made it and re-simulated on demand, so a match can be replayed and checked from the log.
Quarter Mile terms
- The tree
- The light gantry: three ambers half a second apart and then green. When it starts is drawn from the seed, so it cannot be counted down.
- The reaction
- How long after green you were ready, in thousandths of a second. It cannot be negative here: nothing leaves before green.
- ET
- Elapsed time, from green to the finish line. It is what the run is judged on, and it does not include your reaction.
- The trap
- The speed you crossed the finish line at. It says what the car was doing, where the elapsed time says what the run was worth.
- The launch window
- Between 3,000 and 6,200 rpm at green. Above it the tyres spin, below it the engine bogs, and the dial paints the band.
- A shot
- The one use of nitrous you get in a run: two seconds of half as much drive again, capped by what the tyres will take.