Roadmap #6: The Automation I Am Not Building

In Roadmap #2 and Roadmap #3 I told you I wanted to investigate connecting the DEC platform directly to RaceControl.gg, so servers could be created automatically and steward penalties could be pushed straight into the running game.

I have now done that investigation. The answer is no, and I am not going to build it.

Since you are the people who would have benefited from it, you get the full reasoning.

What I Was Actually Looking At

Le Mans Ultimate does not use servers we rent and control ourselves. There are no configuration files on a machine of ours to edit. The servers are hosted centrally and managed through RaceControl.gg, a web portal built and operated by other people. That is not a complaint, it works well.

But it means there is no published way for another application to talk to it. No official interface, no documentation, no keys to request. The only technical route available would be to reverse-engineer the portal: watch what the website sends when a human clicks a button, then have our platform pretend to be that human.

It is possible. Plenty of projects do exactly that. I am not going to.

Four Reasons

The first one ends the discussion by itself. I am asking you to hold yourself to a standard of sporting integrity. I cannot do that while the platform running your championship quietly uses somebody else's system through a door they never opened. If I would have to be vague with you about how a feature works, it should not be a feature.

The second is that it would almost certainly break the terms of service of a platform this entire competition depends on. Risking our access to the thing that hosts our races, to save a few minutes of admin per event, is a terrible trade and I would deserve everything that followed.

The third is reliability, and this is the one that actually kept me up. Undocumented connections can change at any moment, because nobody ever promised they would not. And it would not fail at a convenient time. It would fail at three in the morning, nineteen hours into a 24-hour race, at the exact moment we need a new server after a red flag. That is the worst moment in our entire calendar to depend on something nobody supports.

The fourth is Sustainability, which is one of our four principles for a reason. This kind of integration needs permanent babysitting: every time the other side changes something, somebody has to sit down and repair it. Right now that somebody is me. Creating a permanent maintenance job for myself in order to delete a five-minute task is precisely the trap Roadmap #1 was about.

What This Actually Costs You

Almost nothing, and I want to be specific rather than reassuring. Your server credentials work exactly as planned. A staff member creates the server in the RaceControl.gg portal, and the platform stores the lobby code and password and releases them inside the app only to the drivers on the confirmed line-up for that event. You still get them in one place, at the right time, and people who are not entered still do not get them.

Your penalties are decided by the same flow described in Roadmap #2, calculated by the same rules, published with the same detailed trace and the same audit trail. Nothing about how a decision is reached changes at all. The only difference is the final step: an official applies the penalty in-game rather than the platform doing it. And anything still unresolved when the flag drops is converted into a post-race time penalty in the results staging layer before results are published, so nothing quietly disappears.

The true cost, in full: a staff member spends a few extra minutes per event, and a penalty reaches your car slightly slower than a machine would deliver it.

That is it. That is the whole thing I am trading away, and I would make that trade again.

The Door Is Not Locked

The platform was always designed with this part as a replaceable module: a clearly defined connection point with nothing behind it yet. That design has not changed, so if official access ever appears, it plugs in and nothing else needs rebuilding.

And that is the route I would much rather take. Once the DEC has run real seasons and this platform is a product with a track record instead of a promise, I intend to approach the Le Mans Ultimate developers and the RaceControl.gg team properly, and ask what an official integration could look like.

That is a far better conversation to have with something real to show. It is also a conversation where the answer is allowed to be yes.

Why You Are Reading This At All

I could have quietly dropped this from the plan. These articles are not published yet, nobody has raced here, and there is no scoreboard anywhere recording that I once said I would look into it.

But transparency that only shows up when the news is good is not transparency, it is marketing. I told you I would investigate this, so you get the result of the investigation, including the part where I change my mind in public.

Automation was never the point. Deleting boring administrative work is the point. Where I can do that safely, sustainably and out in the open, I will. Where I cannot, a human does the job, and I tell you so.