The Complete Beginner's Guide to Mars Rally Championship
Welcome to Mars, pilot. Gravity is 38 percent of what you trained on, the surface is loose regolith, and the nearest tow truck is roughly 225 million kilometers away. Mars Rally Championship is free, runs in any modern browser, and asks for no download and no signup — but the red planet does not hand out medals for attendance. This guide is your onboarding, in the order that actually works.
Start at the Proving Ground
The tutorial is called the Proving Ground, and skipping it is the classic rookie mistake. It's a guided course that drills the three skills every Mars pilot lives by: braking early (stopping distances run long at 0.38 g), pivoting on the handbrake, and landing jumps flat. Your co-driver reads pace notes out loud along the way — an actual voice, through your browser's speech engine — so you learn to trust the calls before the championship starts throwing blind crests at you. When the course ends you can stay and practice or head straight for the Mars Cup. Stay five more minutes. Practice the handbrake.
Learn the controls — and the gearbox
Keyboard, gamepad, and mobile touch are all supported. A gamepad works the moment you plug it in, and on a phone you get on-screen touch controls. The keyboard defaults:
| Action | Keys |
|---|---|
| Throttle / brake | W / S (or up / down arrows) |
| Steer | Left / right arrows |
| Handbrake | Space |
| Shift up / down | A / Z |
| Restart stage | R |
| Flip recovery | T |
The rover is electric, and the gearbox has three positions: H, D, and L. D is your default and will carry you through most of the championship. L trades top speed for torque and control — use it on steep climbs and tight sections where D just spins the tires. H stretches your top end on long flats. Keep one eye on the power/battery/regen readout in the HUD: braking feeds charge back into the pack, so smooth driving is literally free energy.
Respect the 0.38 g
Everything you know about braking points is wrong here. At Mars gravity, jumps go long, landings arrive late, and regolith offers a fraction of the grip your instincts expect. Three rules carry further than any setup ever will:
- Brake before the crest, not after. Airborne rovers don't brake.
- Land flat. The damage model tracks chassis, motor, and battery separately, and nose-first landings tax all three.
- Pivot, don't push. A dab of handbrake rotates the rover into hairpins; steering alone just writes a wider line.
Dust storms roll in mid-stage, and at their peak they drain the battery 50 percent faster. Don't panic — ease off, drive clean, and let regen claw some of it back.
Your first medals on Stage 1
Stage 1 is a 2.5 km sunset run that teaches the championship's grammar. Every stage has bronze, silver, and gold pars; bronze here asks only that you finish without treating the scenery as an apex. Split-delta timing shows your live gap to your best run, and the rival ladder always lines up the ghost just above your personal best — beat it, take its spot, repeat. Ghost replays are bit-exact because the physics is deterministic down to the individual wheel, so when you lose to a ghost by three tenths, it wasn't lag. It was you. You can also download your best ghost for each stage, which is either a trophy or evidence, depending on the run.
The results screen also compares your pace to the Perseverance rover's. You will beat Perseverance. It is a low bar. It is still a bar.
Work the daily economy
Once you're finishing stages, the meta loop starts paying out:
- Daily challenge. One seeded run per day — every pilot on Earth (and presumably Mars) gets the identical stage and conditions. It resets at your local midnight, and consecutive days build a streak. Details on the daily challenge page.
- Daily quests. Three per day, and the steadiest credit income a new pilot has.
- Supply crates. 500 credits each, four rarity tiers, and a pity timer so a cold streak can't last forever.
- The garage. Credits and crates feed your garage: 13 paints running from Stainless Steel up to Ion Trail — which glows — plus 5 rim sets and 3 caliper options.
Underneath it all, pilot XP and roughly two dozen achievements tick along whether you're grinding or not. None of it asks for real money. The whole game is free, crates included.
Graduate to the Mars Cup — then go online
When Stage 1 gold stops being aspirational, the full championship is eight stages from 2 to 4 km, every one of them run at sunset, ending in a 4 km decider that throws everything Mars has at you. Submit your times to the global leaderboard with just a call sign — no account, no email.
Then there's online multiplayer: up to 8 pilots on the same stage at the same time, rendered as ghosts, so nobody can punt you off a ridgeline. Create a private room and share a single invite link, or join the public lobby; everyone launches on a synced countdown and the server ranks the finishes. Disconnecting mid-race scores a DNF, which on Mars feels thematically appropriate.
See you at the sunset start line, pilot. Bring a call sign worth typing.