How to play
Tap when the needle is inside the green zone to shift gears.
About Gear Shift Drag Race
Gear Shift Drag Race is a straight-line race that is won or lost on your gear changes. There is no steering and no braking. A needle swings across a gauge, and you tap to shift. Catch it in the green zone and your car surges forward. Miss the zone and you barely gain. At the far end of the strip, a computer rival is trying to get there first.
How to play
At the top of the screen is the gauge: a dark bar with a green section towards the right, and a white needle that sweeps from one end to the other and back, over and over. Below it are two progress bars. The yellow one is you. The red one is the CPU.
Tap or click to shift. If the needle is inside the green zone at that instant, you get a big boost and your bar jumps ahead. If it is anywhere else, you still move, but only by a small step. Every tap counts for something. A good one is worth three and a half poor ones.
The rival does not shift at all. It simply advances at a constant pace and crosses the line about fourteen seconds after the start. The first bar to fill wins, the result is shown at the top, and a tap sets up another race.
Reading the needle
The needle does not travel at an even speed. It slows as it reaches each end of the gauge, turns, and is at its quickest through the middle. The green zone sits between the middle and the right-hand end, so the needle crosses it while it is slowing on the way out and again while it is picking up speed on the way back.
That gives you two chances in every full swing, and a full swing takes about a second and a quarter. The needle spends only about a sixth of its time inside the green, so each window is short. Roughly a tenth of a second.
Shifting well
Find the beat. Because the needle moves in a perfectly regular swing, the green windows come round like the ticks of a clock. Watch two or three swings before you worry about tapping well, and count along.
Tap as the needle enters the zone, not when it is in the middle of it. Your finger takes a moment to land, and the needle will have moved on by then.
The two windows come close together, one on the way out and one on the way back, followed by a longer wait while the needle visits the left side. Good drivers take both. The rhythm is tap, tap, pause, tap, tap, pause.
Eight clean shifts will finish the race. Hit one on nearly every pass and you can be over the line in under ten seconds, well ahead of the red bar.
Winning is the easy part
To be honest about it, the computer is not hard to beat. Because even a mistimed tap moves you forward, plenty of fast tapping will get you home in front. The real game is the margin. How far back is the red bar when you finish? Can you win using green shifts only, with no wasted taps at all? That is far harder than it sounds, and it is the version worth playing.
Short and sharp
A race is over in seconds, so this is a good game for quick rematches and for challenging a friend to a cleaner run.
It plays free in your browser on phones, tablets and computers, with no download.