The digital dream

Slip-streaming, pulling out to overtake, pit stops, handling that changed with tyre wear and fuel load, all the pit lane data on your phone, maybe even self-driving back markers! It was going to be so amazing.

With traditional analog racing the throttle controls the voltage on the track and hence the car’s speed. With digital the voltage on the track is always 12v and encoded in it are signals for each car to set its own speed. For backwards compatibility there was a toggle switch for analog / digital mode.

Which led to the first problem. Track would often have little gaps that made little sparks which would occasionally flip the poor digital car into analog mode. Your beautiful Porsche 917 would then hurtle at 12v into the wall.

This was unacceptable.

The other problem was that it just wasn’t as much fun. The person in front would take the fastest lane. Overtaking required changing to the slower lane. And the act of changing lane itself slowed you down. Staying in the track was hard enough, over taking was impossible.

We did have a lot of fun nights hacking up some pit lane data features and self-driving cars but of course they never really made it to production grade.

I did send all my chips to a friendly helpful guy in New Zealand who was offering to flash them to fix it but by the time they came back the wind had gone out of it.

Digital was actually a different type of racing. Perhaps for enduro. In the end I found I preferred the side by side lap after lap racing of analog.