SLIPLAP

How to play Sliplap

Four controls, and about four seconds to understand them. Everything hard about Sliplap is in what the car does with them.

Play now — free

The controls

• Steer — left and right arrows, or A and D.
• Throttle — up arrow, or W.
• Brake — down arrow, or S.
• Reset — R. Puts you back on the racing line, facing the right way, at a standstill. Use it; nobody is timing your walk home.

A gamepad works, and so does a phone: the touch layout puts steering under your left thumb and the pedals under your right. The game is landscape-only on mobile, because a Formula car is a wide thing to look at.

What the physics is actually doing

The car is not a sprite with a turn rate. Underneath it is a Formula-1-inspired simulation, and it is the reason the same four keys produce a lap time you can improve for hours:

• Downforce. Grip rises with the square of speed. A corner that is impossible at 150 km/h is flat at 280.
• Weight transfer. Braking loads the front axle and unloads the rear. Brake and turn at once and the back steps out.
• Load-sensitive tyres. A slip-angle model with a real peak: past it you are not gripping harder, you are sliding.
• Brake lockup. Full brake at low speed flat-spots the fronts and the car goes straight on, steering or not.
• Slipstream. Sit in the wake of the car ahead and your drag falls. The tow is worth roughly 18 km/h at the end of a long straight — which is how you actually pass someone.

Measured on the reference car: 0–100 km/h in 1.57 s, 378 km/h flat out (396 in the tow), and 300–100 km/h in 58 m at 7.0 g.

Five things that make you faster

1. Brake late, and turn in on the brake. The car stops hard, and a little brake while you turn helps the nose in. Hold a firm brake at full lock for a second and the rear steps out into a slide the wheel alone holds.
2. Look at the corner exit, not the apex. A corner leading onto a straight is worth twice one that does not — sacrifice entry speed for a clean exit.
3. Squeeze, do not flick. Every corner has a clothoid easement, so the curvature builds. Build your steering with it.
4. Stay in the tow. Close enough to feel the drag drop, far enough that you can still brake later than they do.
5. Race your best. Lap Records times you against your own best lap, metre by metre. It is the most honest coach you will get.

Racing other people

Create Room gives you a four-character code. Send it to anyone; up to five of you race the same circuit under the same conditions. The host picks the circuit, the lap count and the time of day, then starts the lights. Finish, and the next race grids up in reverse order so the last race's winner has work to do.

Every car's position is decided by the server, not by the browsers. The only thing your browser ever sends is which keys you are holding, which is why a speed hack or a skipped lap is not something Sliplap detects — it is something it cannot represent.

Turn up after the lights and you spectate until the next race, rather than being dropped onto a live circuit at 300 km/h.

Setting a lap record

Lap Records is the whole game against a clock, and it is one lap. A standing start on the line, no lights and no countdown — the clock begins the moment you touch the throttle, so a moment spent reading the first corner is yours to spend. Cross the line and the run is over: there is no second lap to make it up on, which is the point. Your best lap on each circuit is kept and the live delta races you against it, sector splits tell you where the time went rather than just that it went, and the screen at the end has one button on it — go again.

What you need

A browser with WebGL 2 — Chrome, Edge, Firefox or Safari, on Windows, macOS, Linux, Android or iOS. Nothing to install, no plugin, no account. The whole game is about a megabyte of JavaScript; every circuit, texture, tree, grandstand and engine note is generated when the page loads.

Next: the four circuits, or the FAQ.

Start a race