Roadmap #8: The Doors Are Open

Seven articles of plans, promises and specifications. Here is the eighth, and it is a short message with a lot behind it.

The Digital Endurance Championship platform is live at digitalendurance.app, registration for Season 1 is open, and you can enter your team today.

Not a waiting list. Not a form that emails me. The actual thing: create your team, pick your car, pay your entry fee, and take a place on the grid.

What Entering Actually Looks Like

You sign in with Discord, link your Steam account, and register under your real name. No password to invent.

You create your team: a name, a logo, and up to five preferred car numbers in case your first choice is taken. You invite your drivers with a link you send them. If they already have an account, clicking it puts them on your roster and nothing else is required from them.

Then you enter a season. You choose your class, your car model and your number, and the platform checks that number against every entry already registered, so nobody turns up sharing your digits. You pay the entry fee by card. The moment the payment confirms, your entry is verified, your car appears on the public entry list, and you are in. Start to finish, that is a few minutes. No spreadsheet, no bank transfer screenshot, no waiting two days for a human to notice you exist.

Slots Are Real, And They Run Out

There is something you should know before you take your time thinking about it.

A season has a maximum number of entries, and a maximum per class. What holds your place is a paid entry, not an intention. If you register but delay payment and the grid fills up in the meantime, the place is gone. I chose that deliberately, and against my own first instinct, because the alternative is a grid full of placeholders from teams who never quite commit, while the teams who did everything right sit outside. If the grid fills after you have paid, your entry is refunded under the Refund Policy. If you withdraw, your slot is released immediately for somebody else.

In short: entering early is worth something now.

Have A Proper Look Before You Commit

You should not have to take my word for what you are entering. Every season card shows which classes are running, each in its own colour, with the number of eligible cars in it. Click one and you get the full list, so you can see whether the car you want to race is actually allowed. The platform also knows which cars require which downloadable content, so you can check what you need to own before you spend anything.

The calendar shows every round with the real circuit diagram, the layout being raced, and the start time in your own timezone rather than mine. The entry list shows who has already entered, one table per class, with team logos, car logos and car numbers in the class colour. The full Sporting Regulations are on the site, searchable, with a table of contents. So are the Terms of Service, the Privacy Policy and the Refund Policy, at their current version, with the date you accepted them shown next to each one.

Everything you would want to check before handing over an entry fee is there to check.

We Also Need Officials

The Join the Crew page is live, and I mean it more than most organisations do when they say it.

If you have ever stewarded anywhere, you know the job is 80% paperwork wrapped around the 20% that is actually interesting. As promised in Roadmap #4, the platform does the paperwork here. The incident queue, the decision flow, the published record and the audit trail all exist and all work. What I need is people to make the judgement calls. Staff and Stewards also receive a discount on entry fees, because volunteering should not cost you your own racing.

Your Data Belongs To You

One thing that does not usually appear in a sim racing announcement, because most competitions never get round to building it.

You can download everything the platform holds about you, in one archive, whenever you like. You can ask for details to be corrected. And you can ask to be erased entirely, which starts a 30-day countdown you can cancel at any point, because deletion should never be one accidental click. When it runs, your personal details are replaced with "Former Driver" and the race results stay intact, so the history of the championship survives without you in it.

Files you upload as appeal evidence are scanned for malware before any official can open them. That matters here specifically, because our appeals process invites people to send files to our stewards.

The Week Before You Arrived

I said in Roadmap #7 that I would build a large feature layer before releasing anything. I did the opposite, and put the working version in front of real people instead, because software nobody has touched teaches you nothing.

That decision paid for itself within days. A few things you never had to experience, because they were found first: The "Sign Up Your Team" button did not work. The entire registration flow behind it was complete and correct, and the button pointed at the wrong place. The front door was locked from the inside.

Every race time was wrong by two hours. Nothing in the platform specified a timezone, so a 20:00 Amsterdam start was stored as 20:00 UTC. It hid for weeks because it was consistently wrong in both directions: type a time in, and it came back looking perfect.

Four pages failed on older iPhones. It looked like four separate bugs and had nothing to do with screen size. One shared piece of code used something Safari below version 16.4 cannot read, so every page relying on it stopped dead.

And then I put my own card through the entry fee flow. The first attempt was rejected, for everybody, because our payment provider had switched on a setting by default that refused every charge we made. Nobody could have paid us at all. Second attempt: the money arrived, the entry was verified correctly, and the page that should have returned me to my dashboard broke on a badly built web address.

Money taken, entry confirmed, customer dumped on an error page. That is precisely the sort of thing I wanted to discover with my own card rather than with yours.

Six updates have gone out since the site went live, each fixing what the previous day found. That will keep happening, and it is a good sign rather than a worrying one. Software that never needs an update is software nobody is using.

What Happens Next: The Prologue

The DEC does not have a grid yet. You are early, which is the whole point of this article.

The first thing we run together will be the Prologue, and I want to be honest about what it is for. It is a real event, with real teams, real stewarding and real results. It is also the first time this platform will be tested by anybody other than me. I cannot rehearse a race weekend on my own, and I am not going to pretend otherwise.

So the Prologue is the shakedown. Something will go wrong, I will fix it in public, and I will tell you about it here as I have in every article so far. Then we go racing properly.

The doors are open. Bring a team.