Throttle Trace impressions: The F1 alike where you don’t do the steering
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← Throttle Trace • News22 September 2026 — 4 minute read
By Justin Towell
If you’ve ever played Scalextric or – my childhood passion – Tomy AFX (‘More race in less space!’), Throttle Trace might appeal to you.
Out now via Early Access on Steam, it’s a Formula 1-alike racer in which you accelerate and brake while the game does the steering for you. A strange concept given the most fun part of driving a car is surely steering it, but here we are.
In its unlicensed ‘Vroomula 1’ world, you pilot a sort of futuristic 1990 Ferrari-shaped car around vaguely recognisable tracks, qualifying for races and then managing your tyres.
You do this by watching a little bar empty as you slide through a turn. Such skidding heats up and wears out your tyres, and emptying the bar completely during a corner will cause you to spin, likely crashing and damaging your car in the process.
The racing itself is actually pretty decent, since the left stick allows you to position your car however you like – perfect for overtaking and defending. Just be aware that contact with another car while you’re on the inside will get you a stop/go penalty and also see you receiving an angry email from the other driver.
How you respond affects your power/reputation. While it’s all nicely done, it doesn’t feel like it has as much impact on the action as the interlinked mechanisms of the supreme New Star GP.
This really is a fully simulated motorsport, with real-time dynamic weather affecting tyre strategy in races, voiced pit radio, contracts to sign and maintain, and even full race distances to tackle if you so desire. There’s also a full team/driver editor and even a track designer to make your own raceways. Online multiplayer is even present, but still in beta.
Several elements are clearly unfinished. For instance, the tutorial looks and sounds like it’s crashed until you realise it’s waiting for you to acknowledge the on-screen tip. The menus don’t fit a pad interface or touchscreen very well, suggesting it’s been designed for a mouse, and the 4x speed for VSC and pitstop situations is rather jerky. The graphics, too, are merely passable, with very basic environments and basic lighting. And I haven’t seen this much bloom since 2006’s Oblivion.
The difficulty level can be problematic. It took several stab-in-the-dark attempts with the slider to get a decent level of challenge that wasn’t either impossible or way too easy. I found 66% AI difficulty to be about right for me, but even then some tracks are much harder than others.
The game has provisions for extra realism, allowing you to disable TC and ABS, manually deploy your battery and even play with manual gears. Trouble is, you’re then doing everything you would in a full sim, only without actually steering the car around the corners, which feels odd.
At that stage it feels like the game has lost its core simplicity and appeal, so this is a rare instance where I’d advise actually keeping it dumbed down and ramping up the difficulty slider instead to get the most enjoyable gameplay.
When playing with that basic go/stop Scalextric control, perhaps opting to view the track from a fixed angle beside it instead of chase or driver cam, this is an enjoyable enough way to pass time.
My championship battle against Antola (who seems uncannily similar to an Italian champion-in-waiting I could mention), made for some moments of tangible triumph and I’ve enjoyed playing another save file with harder opponents. There is a good game here, it just needs some fine-tuning.
I’m left convinced Throttle Trace should streamline its core gameplay and focus on providing a curated difficulty level that’s easy to play but hard to win.
The game currently has 10% off its normal price to celebrate its Early Access release on Steam, so it’s worth a look, especially if you love slot car racing. But just remember the reason slot car racing was so popular in the 1980s was because we didn’t have full 3D F1 games at home. Now we do. And I maintain steering is the most fun part of driving a car.
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