Backseat Champions: you do not hold the wheel, you hold the strategy

The title says it all: you are in the back seat. Your driver drives on their own, and you run the race.

Backseat Champions is a motorsport auto battler. While the cars lap, you pick random upgrades, manage boost and aerodynamics to help overtake or defend, deal with the weather and choose the right tyre compound at the right time. A race lasts about ten minutes by default, extendable up to five times with modifiers.

The technical detail that changes everything is that the drivers follow no script. They are driven by a machine learning system the studio trained on its own servers, using the game's tracks. All of them have exactly the same skill. So the race is genuinely simulated: improbable overtakes and spectacular crashes happen on their own, and when you lose, it is because your choices were worse. Mostly, because motorsport is still motorsport.

That is what makes it gripping. You watch your car the way a team principal watches a Grand Prix, heart in mouth at every pit stop, wondering whether switching to wets was too early.

Co-op lets you race championships together, and a multiplayer demo is available before you buy. The game launches today in Early Access.

Its limits come from the concept. You never drive, and anyone who wants a wheel in their hands will get bored fast. The randomness of upgrades can also frustrate when a race hinges on a bonus that never shows up. For fans of race strategy, though, it is a little gem.

Your best tyre strategies belong on the InsertCoins Discord, between two debates about the last Grand Prix.