Scoring, Leaderboards and Fair Play
What the clock measures, what reaches the leaderboard, how names work without accounts, and an honest account of what does and does not stop a faked time.
There is one number that matters in Daily Dirt Rally: how long three laps took you. This page explains exactly how that number is produced, stored and displayed, and where the limits of the system are.
What the clock measures
Timing starts when the three-second countdown clears — not when the page loads, and not when you first press a key. It stops the moment you cross the finish line on your third valid lap. Everything in between counts: excursions into the grass, time spent reversing out of a corner you overcooked, and the seconds you spent collecting a canister you never spent.
A lap is only valid if you passed every checkpoint on it, so the timer cannot be beaten by shortcutting. If the lap counter refuses to advance when you cross the line, you missed a gate — the how to play guide covers what to do about it.
What gets stored
When you finish, you are asked for a name, and the finished run is posted to the daily board. Each stored entry is deliberately minimal:
| Field | What it holds |
|---|---|
| Name | Up to 10 characters, chosen per run |
| Time | Total race duration in milliseconds |
| Track date | Which day’s track it was set on |
| Created | Timestamp of submission |
There is no account, no email address, no password and no profile. Nothing links two entries by the same name to the same person, and nothing links either to you. What the privacy policy says we store is genuinely all we store.
Names
Names are chosen at submission time and capped at ten characters. They are checked against a profanity filter, and a name that fails is rejected rather than silently censored — you will be asked for a different one.
Names are not reserved or owned. Two people can use the same name on the same day, and one person can post several times under the same name. Because every finish creates its own entry, a fast driver can legitimately occupy more than one slot in the top ten. It is a quirk of the design rather than a bug, and it makes the board read as a list of the day’s ten fastest runs rather than its ten fastest people.
How the board resets
Every entry is filed against the track date it was driven on, so the leaderboard resets with the track. At the rollover, today’s times move to yesterday, the front page starts showing the previous day’s winner in the champion slot, and the new board opens empty. Nothing is deleted — the previous day’s times remain filed against that date.
Fair play, honestly
We would rather tell you how this works than imply protection that does not exist.
Race times are measured in your browser and submitted to the server when you finish. The server checks that the name is acceptable and that the fields are present; it does not yet re-simulate your run to confirm the time is physically achievable. That means the daily board runs substantially on trust.
What that means in practice:
- We remove implausible entries. Times below what the track’s length and the truck’s top speed physically allow get deleted when we spot them. The terms of service reserve that right explicitly.
- Server-side validation is planned. The pieces are already in place — the server generates the track and knows its length, and multiplayer races already run their physics through the server — so verifying a submitted time against a plausible minimum is a tractable next step rather than a rewrite. It will appear in the changelog when it ships.
- There is nothing to win. No prizes, no ranking that carries over, no currency. The board resets in a matter of hours. Faking a time buys you a few hours of a name on a list, which is a poor return on the effort.
Getting a genuinely fast time
If you want to be at the top of the board honestly, the order of gains is fairly consistent:
- Stop going off-track. A single excursion costs more than any other single mistake. See track limits.
- Brake later. The brake is far stronger than it feels, and most drivers give away a second a lap braking early. See cornering.
- Spend every canister on a long straight. Three well-placed boosts are worth several seconds; three badly-placed ones are worth nothing. See nitro timing.
- Drive the layout twice before you count a run. The track does not change all day, so there is no reason to set your time on an unfamiliar circuit.
Questions this did not answer are probably in the frequently asked questions.