How to play
- Press any key to start. Your car is the blue one in the lower lane.
- Type the word under the track. Every correct character drives you forward.
- Nothing else needs pressing. No space bar, no Enter, and no mouse at any point.
- Watch the grip gauge. It rises when your keystrokes fall into an even rhythm.
- The shaded bands are corners. Poor grip there makes you skid and waste road.
- A wrong key slides you back a length. First car to the flag wins. Escape pauses.
The lap is won on rhythm, not on top speed
This is the part no other racing typing game does. Every one of them turns a single number into speed: how fast you type. This game uses two numbers, because a real car has a top speed and it also has grip, and a driver with no grip does not finish first however much power is under the bonnet.
Your speed comes from how fast you type. Your grip comes from how evenly you type. On the straights grip does not matter and raw speed is everything. In the corners, which make up a little under half the lap, a car with no grip skids, and the characters you are typing buy you far less road than they should. The work is going into the skid instead of into the lap.
The result is that a driver who bursts and stalls can out-type the rival the whole way round and still lose, and the end screen tells them so in as many words, along with how many metres of road the rhythm threw away. That is not a gimmick. It is the same thing that happens in a timed typing test, where an uneven rhythm leaks far more seconds than a slightly lower top speed ever would.
How grip is worked out
The game times the gap between each of your keystrokes. It then takes the spread of those gaps over your last few keys and divides it by their average. Dividing by the average is the important step: it measures how steady you are relative to your own pace, which is what makes the figure fair between a fast typist and a slow one. A low spread means a regular pattern of keystrokes, so grip is simply one minus that figure.
Grip on the gauge is read from your last few keys only, so it responds to how you are driving right now. The same calculation taken across the whole lap is what the end screen reports as your consistency, which is the figure to watch from one race to the next.
The rival is a yardstick, not an obstacle
Left alone, the rival drives at a shade under your own best recorded result here, perfectly smoothly. That makes losing informative rather than annoying: a rival a little slower than your best has beaten you, so your rhythm cost you more than that margin. You can also set a fixed pace from learner to expert if you would rather race a target than yourself.
The sums are calibrated so that someone typing at the rival speed with flawless rhythm finishes exactly level with it. Nothing is stacked against you. If you lose while typing faster than the rival, the corners are the only possible reason, and the end screen says how much they took.
Four sets of words
- Classic uses everyday English, as a general typing test does.
- My weak keys builds the words from the characters you keep missing, read from your own record here.
- Job words uses dispatch, clerical, medical and accounts vocabulary.
- Numbers uses figures and reference codes, for data entry practice.
How to find an even rhythm
- Drop your pace until the grip gauge sits high, then build back up from there.
- Keep your fingers on the home row. Most stalls are a hand leaving it to hunt.
- Do not sprint the easy words. A burst you cannot hold is what breaks the rhythm.
- Look at the word, not at your hands. Glancing down is a stall every time.
- If one key keeps stopping you, switch to weak keys mode and race on those.
What to watch on the end screen
Your lap time and words per minute are the obvious figures, but consistency and the metres lost in the corners are the ones that tell you what to practise. A race won at ninety per cent consistency is worth more than a faster one won at forty, because the steady lap is the one whose habits survive into a timed test. Chase the consistency figure up over a few races and the speed tends to follow on its own.
Questions about the car race typing game
You race a rival car around a lap by typing the words shown under the track. Every correct character drives you forward, and the first car to the chequered flag wins. It runs in your browser with no download and no account.
Those games turn one number into speed: how fast you type. This one uses two. Your speed still comes from how fast you type, but your grip comes from how evenly you type, and the track has corners. On a straight, raw speed is everything. In a corner, a car with no grip skids and the characters you are typing buy far less road. So you can out-type the rival the whole way round and still lose the lap, which is precisely what an uneven rhythm does to you in a real typing test.
It is how even the gaps between your keystrokes are. The game takes the spread of those gaps over your last few keys and divides it by their average, which is a standard way of measuring how regular a pattern is, and grip is one minus that figure. Dividing by the average is what makes it fair between a fast typist and a slow one: it measures steadiness relative to your own pace rather than in raw milliseconds. The same calculation over the whole lap is reported at the end as your consistency.
Because bursts and stalls cost more than they appear to. Typing in a rush and then stopping to hunt for a key averages out to a respectable number, but the stalls are where mistakes happen and where a timed test quietly leaks seconds. A steady rhythm is also the thing that improves fastest with practice. Nothing stops you winning here on raw speed, but the game shows you how much road a rough rhythm threw away even when you win.
By default a shade under your own best recorded result on this site, driven perfectly smoothly, so if it beats you then your rhythm is costing you more than that margin. You can also pick a fixed pace from learner to expert. The rival is calibrated so that someone typing at the same words per minute with flawless rhythm would finish dead level with it, and a photo finish is given to you rather than to the rival.
It is free and needs no account. Races stay out of your test history, your progress charts, the leaderboard and any certificate, because a game is not a measured typing test. The one thing carried over is the keys you mistyped, which are added to your weak-key list so your practice can target them.
Then prove it in a timed test
A race shows you what your rhythm is costing. A timed test tells you whether smoothing it out worked, and it is also what raises the rival, since the rival is set from your own best. Race, practise, then test.