Slipstream Circuit

Typing

Type the word, then a space to send it.

A wrong key locks the word until you type the right one, and brakes the car at once. The pace readout is not braked, so it still shows what you really typed. Words get longer as the race goes on.

What you type

Six steps. Home keys uses only the seven letters your fingers rest on, asdfjkl, and the space. Home row adds g and h, the two your index fingers stretch sideways for. Plain opens the whole alphabet. Caps & punctuation adds shift and the marks that end a word. Numbers mixes two- to five-digit tokens into the plain words.

Your own text is the sixth, and it is the only one that is not a word list: paste a passage into the box under the Text control, press Use this text, and the race serves your words in the order you wrote them and then starts them again. It is what a typing tutor is for — a speech, a report, the vocabulary of your own job.

Be clear about the trade. The five word lists are built so that every letter appears in enough words of every length for the game to pick a word that practises a key; your passage carries no such promise, so the three things that choose between words all stop: the ramp from short words to long ones as the race goes on, the slow-key bias, and the finger drill. Nothing that measures stops — your keys are still timed, and the results screen still names your slowest key and your slowest finger. Records count as usual, so the bar is only as hard as the passage you paste.

The keyboard guide

On a computer a keyboard is drawn under the word, lighting the next key in the colour of the finger that presses it and marking where your index fingers rest. It turns itself on for Home keys, Home row and Numbers, and the Keys control overrides it anywhere; the digits row appears on the Numbers step and on Your own text, which may contain anything. Layout draws it as QWERTY, Dvorak or Colemak.

The drills

Two of them. The standing one follows your slowest keys across recent races and quietly steers words toward them; it is always on once there is enough history for it, and the panel on the start screen lists the keys.

The other you ask for. When the results screen names a finger, it offers a button to drill that finger next race — roughly doubling how much of what you type sits under it, in the keys that finger takes on your keyboard. It lasts one race, the start screen says which finger while it is on, and it pauses the slow-key drill until it is over. The two lesson pools are seven and nine letters wide, so on those steps a finger they cannot reach is not offered and the results screen says why.

Pace and the tow

Your car runs on your rolling pace over the last five seconds, so coasting slows it. Running close behind another car catches its tow. Rivals never get one, so each averages exactly its rated pace.

Solo practice

The fourth Grid setting is Solo practice: an empty track, no rivals and not even your own ghost, so you can just find the keys. It still teaches the drill which keys are slow, but sets no lap record — there is nothing to chase.

The course

Seven lessons stepping from the eight home keys to the number row, each raced solo against an accuracy bar and, in four of the seven, a pace bar too. Clear one and the next opens. Your own settings are handed back untouched. A lesson you have cleared can be raced again from the list beside the heading, as often as you like: a replay is graded and drilled like any lap, but it never moves the ladder in either direction, and missing its bar cannot un-clear it.

The championship

Three rounds of three laps, one on each circuit in turn, against four rivals — the grid you had when you started, held for all three rounds, and no ghost of your own. Positions score 10, 8, 6, 4 and 2 and carry over; the third round settles it. Rounds set lap records like any race. Abandoning one voids it.

Reading your results

Where you lost time ranks your slowest keys by the mean gap from the previous keystroke, slowest first, with an upright mark at your own average for the race. The first letter of each word is excluded — that gap is reading, not typing. Where a key has history, a middle number gives the change since it first appeared, and negative is quicker.

Which finger is holding you back pools those same keystrokes by the finger that presses each key on your chosen layout. A capital counts on the finger of the letter, not the shift. The thumb is drawn but never ranked: it presses one key. A finger needs ten presses of its own before it is given a time, so a short race can leave several unranked.

Sharing and backups

Share result gives you a card to screenshot and a link carrying your ghost, so whoever opens it can race what you did. Records holds your lap records, and the backup code under them moves everything saved here — records, career, key profile, course, championship — to another browser. Restoring replaces all of it.

Reduced motion

If your system asks for reduced motion, the race obeys it — on the track as well as on the page, and it follows the setting while you play rather than only at load. The cars keep racing, because that is the game: every car is still drawn, in its true place, so you can see who is ahead. What stops is the decoration — the speed streaks, the marching dashes on the tow line and the word plates that ride around the circuit — and the field is redrawn four times a second in discrete steps instead of sliding. Nothing about the race gets easier or harder: the words, the rivals and the clock are identical, and the word you are typing and the ones queued behind it are on the band above the track, where they never move.

Keys

Esc pauses mid-race; on this card or a result card it steps back one, and anywhere else it clears the grid and comes back here. Tab moves between controls and stays inside whichever card is open, and nothing behind an open card can be reached at all.