An AI race engineer for sim racing. Race Engineer connects to racing simulators, reads live telemetry, and acts as a voice-driven race engineer that helps you with endurance strategy, car tuning, and real-time situational awareness (positions, gaps, fuel, tires, brakes, driver aids).
The first supported game is Le Mans Ultimate (LMU).
Platform: Windows 10/11 (x64) only. Race Engineer ships, runs, and is distributed only on Windows — that is where the sims and their telemetry/input interfaces live. macOS and Linux are not runtime targets. (Development can happen on any OS for the OS-agnostic parts — see 12-DEV-SETUP — but the product is Windows-only.)
Read-only and advisory by design. Race Engineer never changes anything in the game. It reads telemetry and the car's current setup so it can tell you exactly what to change — you make every change yourself. No input injection, no settings writes, no driving automation.
Status: Planning / pre-implementation. This repository currently contains the full product and engineering plan. No application code has been written yet.
- Live telemetry — Reads fuel, per-wheel tire temps/pressures/wear, brake temps, TC / ABS / brake-bias / engine-map settings, lap/sector times, positions and gaps directly from the running game.
- Voice race engineer — Talks to you with an AI voice. You map a button on your wheel as a push-to-talk radio, hold it, and ask questions ("How's my fuel?", "When should I box?", "The car won't rotate into the corner — what do I change?"). It answers in natural speech.
- Knows your car — It already knows your full setup and current aids, so when you describe a handling problem it tells you the precise change to make ("move brake bias back two clicks for rotation on entry").
- Endurance strategy — Fuel/stint planning, pit windows, undercut/overcut math, fuel-save targets, tire-degradation modeling, multi-class traffic management. It works the strategy continuously in the background and jumps on the radio when it spots an opportunity.
- Anticipatory traffic — Proactive call-outs from the live data: a faster class closing, blue flags, a slower car ahead in a braking zone, pit-window reminders. (No instant "car alongside" proximity call — that split-second awareness stays with the driver's eyes and mirrors.)
It advises; it never acts on the car for you.
Start at docs/00-OVERVIEW.md, then follow the numbered docs. Each document is scoped so it can be loaded into Claude Code as focused context.
| Doc | Purpose |
|---|---|
| 00-OVERVIEW | Vision, goals, personas, scope, MVP definition |
| 01-ARCHITECTURE | System components, processes, data flow |
| 02-TECH-STACK | Chosen stack, rationale, alternatives |
| 03-LMU-INTEGRATION | Le Mans Ultimate telemetry & setup reading (read-only) |
| 04-DATA-MODEL | Canonical telemetry schema, events, persistence |
| 05-STRATEGY-ENGINE | Fuel / tire / pit / multi-class math specs |
| 06-AI-ENGINEER | LLM design, prompts, tools, latency tiers |
| 07-VOICE-IO | Speech-to-text, text-to-speech, push-to-talk |
| 08-INPUT-AND-CONTROLS | Wheel input (PTT), reading setup/aids, tuning advice |
| 09-UI-UX | Screens, in-game overlay, dashboards |
| 10-ROADMAP | Phased milestones with acceptance criteria |
| 11-RISKS-AND-COMPLIANCE | Read-only stance, latency, cost, privacy |
| 12-DEV-SETUP | Environment, repo structure, scripts, testing |
| 13-GLOSSARY | Sim racing + project terms |
| 14-BUILD-PLAN | Dependency-ordered build sequence for Claude Code |
| 15-COST-AND-FREE-OPERATION | Free/local-first operation, BYO-key, no-surprise-bill design |
| 16-PLATFORM-PREREQUISITES | OS permissions, audio, local-model setup, signing, system requirements, legal |
See CLAUDE.md for instructions to Claude Code working in this repo.
Le Mans Ultimate ──(shared memory + local REST, READ-ONLY)──▶ Telemetry + Setup Adapter
│
▼
Normalizer → Race State (60 Hz)
│
┌───────────────────────────────┼───────────────────────────────┐
▼ ▼ ▼
Strategy Engine Event Detector Telemetry UI
(fuel/tire/pit, (overtakes, flags, (dashboard +
undercut/overcut) gaps, opportunities) overlay)
└───────────────┬───────────────┘
▼
Wheel PTT button ─▶ Input Reader ─▶ Voice I/O ─▶ AI Engineer (Claude + read-only tools) ─▶ Voice I/O
(read-only) (mic / STT) (TTS — advice only)
Nothing flows back into the game. The engineer's only output to the driver is its voice (and the on-screen dashboard).
Race Engineer is a Windows 10/11 (x64) desktop app. Grab Race Engineer-<version>-setup.exe
(installer) or -portable.exe (no install) from the releases, or build it yourself:
pnpm install
pnpm --filter @race-engineer/desktop dist:win # → apps/desktop/dist/
First run shows a SmartScreen warning — this is expected. The app is unsigned (we ship without a code-signing certificate, by choice — it keeps the project free; see docs/16). When Windows says "Windows protected your PC," click More info → Run anyway. If your antivirus flags it, that's a false positive on an unsigned app that reads game memory and the mic — allow it, or build from source above.
Race Engineer is built to be free to run and free to publish. It is a client-side desktop app: there is no server and no shared key, so the publisher's inference cost is $0 regardless of user count. The default profile runs entirely on free local models (no key, offline-capable); cloud providers are opt-in and bring-your-own-key, stored only in OS secure storage. No secret is ever committed to the repo. See 15-COST-AND-FREE-OPERATION.
Race Engineer is licensed under the Apache License 2.0 — see LICENSE, NOTICE, and THIRD-PARTY.md. Race Engineer is strictly read-only and advisory: it reads sanctioned telemetry interfaces and the car's setup, then tells the driver what to change. It never writes to the game, never changes settings or driver aids, and never automates driving. See 11-RISKS-AND-COMPLIANCE and, for permissions / signing / system requirements, 16-PLATFORM-PREREQUISITES.
Race Engineer is an independent project and is not affiliated with, endorsed by, or sponsored by Le Mans Ultimate, Studio 397, or Motorsport Games.