Backmarkers: A Racing Management Sim

You own the team nobody rates: the cheapest car in a fictional regional series, one driver, and a budget that won't survive many mistakes. Everything between here and the top flight is your problem now.

Race day is live, and the pit wall is yours

Races play out as a top-down broadcast — qualifying, overtakes, safety cars, rain sweeping in, spray off the cars ahead. You set the strategy and change it on the fly: tire compounds, fuel loads, pace orders, and the stop plan itself. When the engineer calls with a decision — rain's coming, the tank is short — the broadcast keeps rolling and you answer before the window closes. No pause button required.

Build the team, not just the car

Sign drivers off a market with form, age and personality; train them, coach them through their careers, and replace them when they retire — or lose them to it. Hire staff, court sponsors with their own agendas, and keep the books balanced, because prize money never covers everything.

The garage deals in evidence, not answers

Commission parts from suppliers with their own reputations. What arrives is never quite what the brochure promised — and no screen will ever show you a part's true numbers. Rent the track for a test day and you get a stopwatch reading with noise on it; a better engineer buys you a cleaner read. Fit it, shelve it, or sell it before it hurts you.

A pyramid that lives without you

Three series run their seasons in parallel every weekend. Win promotion and your beaten rivals follow you up; finish last at the top and the ladder runs both ways. Nobody is generated to fill a slot — the record book keeps every season, every race result, every career, and any name on any screen opens its history.

• A full ownership sim: drivers, staff, sponsors, finances, development, strategy
  
• Broadcast-style races you can watch, fast-forward, or skip — your call
  
• Hidden information done honestly: scouting bands and test verdicts, never raw stats
  
• A persistent world with promotion, relegation, aging and retirement
  
• Entirely fictional grid — every team, driver, sponsor and circuit is original

Under the hood

Backmarkers is a solo project built on Godot 4 with C# and .NET. The race, the season and the whole three-tier pyramid run in an engine-free simulation library that the Godot shell only draws, so every race can be replayed and tested headlessly. The circuits, cars and dashboards are drawn from code as vector graphics, every sound is synthesized at startup, and there is no middleware or third-party binding in the build. Contact me if you would like to know more about how the game is put together.