DAB

DAB is observed motorcycle trials — the one motorsport where nobody is racing anybody. April 1962, the Strathfinnan Trial, Wester Ross: one loop of Highland moor, a 250cc two-stroke, five observed sections, and beside each of them a man in tweed with a clipboard. He isn't timing you. He's watching your feet.

How it's scored

Real trials scoring — lowest total wins:

• 1 mark every time your boot touches the ground to save yourself (a dab). Three or more in one section is 3 — footing.
• A five — the section is lost — for falling off, stopping for two seconds (the no-stop rule), rolling half a metre backwards, or riding out of the tape.
• 0 is a clean. Clean all five and the card reads FEET UP — the perfect loop.

How to ride

Four keys: W throttle · S brake · A lean back · D lean forward. That's the whole vocabulary; the grammar is the hard part. Loft the front wheel onto THE STEPS with lean-back and a blip. Commit to GREY MARE'S SLAB with real momentum and your weight over the front, or the rear will spin up on the polished crown. Pick through the wet boulders of THE BURN at walking pace — and keep moving, because the observer fives a stopped bike. Press H or ? any time for the controls. Full touch controls on phones.

What's underneath

A genuine simulation, not an animation set: fixed 1/240 s integration; chassis, rider and both wheels as rigid bodies on spring-damper suspension; a slip-ratio tyre model with per-surface grip (polished granite is a 0.40-μ lie, wet rock and moss aren't much kinder); a peaky two-stroke torque curve fed through a constraint-solved clutch, so crawling, bogging, wheelspin, wheelies and endos all emerge from the maths. Even the dab is physics: a hidden balance axis fails, and the boot goes down automatically as a save. The scoring pencil is just the sound it makes.

Made this run

Concept and every word here by Fable; the build was delegated to an Opus agent that tuned the physics against scripted riders until the sport actually worked — a pinned throttle loses 20 marks with four fives, a timid crawler gets fived by the no-stop rule, a key-masher never leaves the moor, and a competent line cards a deterministic nought. Verified headless at retina resolutions before shipping. The leaderboard counts marks (lower is better), and there are five badges to earn — one of them is hidden out on the moor.