Speedway 500: from a rectangular oval to something worth showing

29 August to 2 September 2026:

The rebuild of "Indianapolis 500: The Simulation" ran for a year and a half as a side project and looked like it: one track, one car, and a HUD that took away half the view. This week it turned into a game you can open without apologising. In order.

The screenshots are on the game page.

Fidelity to the original means going and looking at what was actually there

• Three car-specific cockpits instead of one, with real rear-view mirrors through a separate render pass
• Turbo boost 1 to 9 is the main instrument, with a red limit and a heat warning. In the original it governs pace and consumption at once
• 24 checked points around the track: the white wall, no floating ground, 33 pit boxes, real bricks at the start-finish line, a retro look with no modern post-processing
• Cameras repositioned: the TV and leader cameras onto the grandstand roofs, the cockpit eye point at driver height so the nose is visible
• The pit board shows the car from above, with the gauges sitting in the tyres and the tank in the middle. You select on the car, by touch
• A retro image mode as an option: a 320 by 180 raster and a 16-colour palette, as in 1989

The rolling start was a full-brake stop with a cloud of smoke

While rolling up, the wheels and gearbox stood still as the car moved: 100 per cent slip. The result was a cloud of smoke and a car braking itself to a halt. Wheels and gearbox are now synchronised to the pace speed, and the field rolls at pace speed from the moment it appears. The formation lap is single file, held to the racing line by a magnetic band, and the starting position is right.

Along with it, the race rules you only notice when they are missing: no visible position jumps, no ghost cars, and green comes only from the leader.

Driving aids that do not mistake their own output for the driver

The phone now has its own menu of aids you can switch off: auto throttle, braking assist, steering assist, tilt steering and a one-tap pit stop. Auto throttle uses the same cornering model as the autopilot: full throttle until about 6 m/s before the limit, then coasting, with a cap against spinning under braking.

The bug that took longest: the driver's input was read from the input actions, the same place the aid itself writes to. It mistook its own output for the driver and switched itself off the moment it intervened. It is read at the source now, from keys and touch. The proof is a dedicated run: two clean laps on aids alone, 45.5 s.

What an acceptance run is worth depends on where it measures

• Lap time in the reference run: 41.15 s
• Top speed: 367 km/h
• Two laps on driving aids alone: 45.5 s
• Full race, player from P33 to P6
• HUD height: 92 px to 54 px

The acceptance run came back green at one point without being green: what was being evaluated was a variable that resets itself when read. The process exit code is evaluated now, and the runs are reproducible because saved player options are set aside for the duration. A setup saved in the garage had previously cost three seconds of lap time and failed the run without a single code change.

And the sound

Engine sounds per car type, an audible turbo, and ambient sound. The attract demo in the main menu now runs a real AI field instead of a recording.

The name

In the game and on the store the title is Speedway 500. The website had only carried the working name, Indy 500 Reloaded. Both stand side by side now; otherwise nobody looking for one will find the other.

The Manufaktur dev