Create a race and read out the code you are given, or type in the one
a friend read to you. The host presses START, the lights count down
from five, and first across the finish gantry wins. Hold the
spacebar for nitro and hold Shift with the wheel over to drift --
the car stays sideways for as long as you hold it, and the wheel
picks how far. Q is the handbrake. Press R if you end up somewhere
you would rather not be.
Everything else
Once you are on the grid, the card in the middle sets your name,
trim colour, car and livery. Once the leader is home the rest have
forty-five seconds. Then the room picks another of the hundred
courses -- never one of the last five -- every machine builds it
from its number, and the grid forms again.
Everything you drive through is generated in code from that
course's number: terrain, road, city, the cars and their physics.
Nothing is downloaded, so the room only ever has to agree on which
of the hundred it is. Share the room link to race friends; the
public room is GRID. Practice offline runs the same room logic in
your own browser.
A lit line is painted down the road: wide into a corner, tight
at the apex, wide out of it, which is the way through to slide.
Drifting is how the nitro bar gets filled: hold the key through a
corner and turn into it for a bigger angle, or feed in a little
opposite lock to stand the car back up and tidy the exit. A corner
held sideways is worth about half a charge, and holding one is
worth more per second the longer it goes on. A full charge lasts a
few seconds, comes back slowly on its own and quickly in another
car's slipstream, and comes back faster still for holding a slide,
for holding the line -- the longer the better -- or for driving
over one of the lit pads let into the road. Away inside a quarter of a second of the lights is a
perfect start. Cars can touch unless the host turns contact off.
B looks behind, C changes camera and comes back to your own car
once you are home, H clears the screen for a photograph and G saves
one. Escape opens the settings, where every driving key can be
moved, the interface resized, the trim colours pulled apart, the
flashing trimmed and every sound captioned.
Every race is five kilometres of sprint on a course the room
picks, so there is nothing to set up and nothing to agree on. What
the host does choose is who is on the grid: up to five bots, a
series of three or five races for points, whether cars can touch,
whether everyone drives the same car, and whether the room is
listed publicly.