when going on the gas. "Steering help" smoothened the steering actions (as an indication, one would experience cars steering slightly into corners all on their own when this help was activated). This was a subtle exercise, as it could give the impression of cars driving themselves when implemented too strongly. As experience showed, a balance was found, which turned F1GP, and its successors, into a racing game that could be fully enjoyed and played well via digital input devices. As an aside, it is illustrative for the depth of the game that people actually learned to overcome the need for "Throttle Assistance" when using the keyboard, and discovered that disabling it and applying the right techniques enabled "digital" drivers to go faster (at the expense of tyre wear). To this day F1GP remains a unique and world leading example in providing a learning curve that caters from the utter driving novice to the very advanced sim-driver. Limitations Despite these great achievements, F1GP also contained a flaw that was considered irrelevant at first, but would later seriously compromise the potential of the game and its successors. Geoff Crammond wrote the game long before the era of DirectX, OpenGL and 3D acceleration video cards, so F1GP was built around a proprietary 3D engine that ran in software. This engine was set up in such a way that a fixed frame rate had to be chosen (up to 25.6 frame/s on the PC version), and the game would at all times try to render the specified number of frames. The result was that the engine would never drop frames when the CPU couldn't handle the rendering in realtime. Instead, gametime itself was slowed down. The software itself provided an option to display the CPU-load, pressing the "o" key. When this was higher than 100%, the game was no longer working in realtime. This would become known in the community as the infamous "slow-motion driving". Since the rendering was obviously dependent on the complexity of the scene, this also meant that one could experience slowdowns of the action only on certain parts of certain tracks, or when there were many cars around (for example at the start). The game did provide options to eliminate trackside details; (CTRL-D), and in addition one could also choose a lower framerate to avoid the problem altogether. It also has to be understood that gamers didn't have quite the