The idea
Countdown typing tests measure a strange thing: how much you can cram into someone else’s window. A time trial measures what racers actually care about — the lap itself. Same track for everyone, a stopwatch instead of a timer, and one number that is beautifully easy to compete over: how fast did you finish?
That one design choice changes the psychology completely. A record is personal, improvable, and infinitely dareable — “beat 26.4 seconds” travels between friends far better than any abstract score. The lap is short enough to retry five times in a row and long enough that your time genuinely means something.
How it’s measured
The lap is a fixed 172-character passage — the same for every rider in your language, which is what makes records comparable. The stopwatch starts on your first keystroke and stops only when the entire lap is typed exactly right: mistakes are allowed, but you must fix them, so errors cost time instead of being silently forgiven.
Your speed uses the standard definition — correctly typed characters divided by five (the conventional “word”), divided by minutes elapsed. Accuracy is the lap length divided by everything you actually typed, corrections included. Pasting is blocked, everything is measured locally in your browser, and the English and Italian laps are different tracks: compare times within the same language.
Questions, answered
Is this fair on a phone?
The measurement is identical, but thumbs are slower than ten fingers and autocorrect is disabled to keep the trial honest — so expect a slower lap on mobile. Compare phone records with phone records.
Can I retry as many times as I want?
Absolutely — that is the whole sport. Only the lap you choose to share becomes “the record”, exactly how personal bests have always worked.
Why does the clock keep running when I make a mistake?
Because that is what makes the time honest. A trial that stops for errors rewards sloppiness; here a mistake costs exactly the seconds it takes you to fix it, so speed and accuracy are measured by the same clock.