Everything Traces does, in the order you meet it: connect, drive, compare, and what each page is for.
New in 1.5.6: the Home page shows a Your first session card with five steps: connect, drive a lap, open it, compare with a faster lap, read the Coach. Each step ticks itself off and links to where it happens. Hide asks first; the Quick Start button brings the card back.
Recording is automatic. As soon as telemetry flows, every lap is captured with its speed, throttle, brake, steering, gear, RPM, tyre temperatures, fuel and position on track.
New in 1.6: the Recording page has three tabs. Telemetry is the page above. Video records the PS5's picture as well - through a capture card, a PS Remote Play window, or from a video file - and cuts each lap out as its own file, tied to the session (section 13). Replays lists every recording with the laps cut from it.
Every saved session, newest first, with track, car, laps and best lap. Sessions recorded on another machine with your account appear here too and download the first time you open them.
New in 1.6.6: tags. The tag button beside a session's name adds your own labels - Race, Qualifying, the name of a championship. They show as chips under the name, the Tag filter sits with the others, and clicking a chip shows only the sessions with that tag. Tags go with the session to your Traces account. Select all: tick the whole page and a line over the table offers every session your filters match - "Select all 59 sessions that match" - for the optimal lap or for Delete, not only the page you see.
New in 1.6: the filters apply the moment you pick. Track, car and the dates are picks, so the list follows at once; the name is typed, so it waits for Enter, Apply, or a pause in the typing. The pickers narrow each other: pick a track and the car list holds only the cars you drove there, pick a car and the tracks shrink to where you drove it.
New in 1.5.6: the Library comes back to the page you were on after Telemetry, and you can type a page number next to the page buttons. A renamed session is one row again (its cloud copy kept the old name as its id). The import button in the community picker is an add-to-library icon.
The session at a glance: best lap (with a Load button), average lap, fuel per lap, the lap-time progression and the Timing table. The best lap is pinned at the top of the table; every lap has a Load button.
The lap on the map with the channels below. Move the mouse over a trace and the car follows on the map. Use the + / − on the map to zoom; it keeps following the car. The segment pills above show the split times.
All channels stacked, with the delta on top once a reference is loaded. The map column has a fixed width; the Map switch shows or hides it, and Fit shows the whole track. The transport under the map plays the lap back at 0.5× to 4× (space toggles).
Tap once to set point A, tap again for point B, then drag a finger to scrub between them.
New in 1.6: on Performance, a lap that has a video (section 13) opens with the picture beside the map; the three view buttons at the top right choose map and video, the map alone, or two videos side by side once a reference is attached. A segment pill picks one segment at a time - click it again to let go. With Follow the playhead on (the transport), the channels scroll with the lap as it plays.
New in 2.0.1: the view buttons at the top right have names. Map + video, Video, Map and Compare choose the layout (Video is the picture alone, across the stage); Tyres on the left and Coach on the right show or hide those panels. On a narrow window they fold into one View button with the same choices. Keys: 1 to 4 for the layouts, T for the tyres, C for the coach.
New in 1.5.6: the reference lap is remembered per track and car, so leaving Telemetry and coming back keeps it; the X on the Reference row or a session of another track or car drops it. When nothing is loaded to compare, the delta panels are buttons that open the picker. The Performance tab fits a laptop screen, and the play button sits by the zoom controls on the Performance and Coach tabs.
A reference is any lap you compare against. Load one lap, then pick the reference; every trace shows both, the delta shows where you gain and lose, and the segment pills badge the three biggest losses.
New in 1.6.6: the swap button next to the X on the Reference row turns the two laps round. The reference becomes the loaded lap and the loaded lap the reference, each on its own lap, so the delta reads the right way round after opening them in the wrong order.
The optimal lap is your best run through each segment of the track, taken from different laps and stitched into one lap. It is saved as an ordinary session, so it can be loaded, compared against, and used for the live delta.
New in 1.6.6: the optimal lap leaves out what was not driven. A segment far quicker than all your others (a cut), a segment with a jump in it (the car moving further in a moment than it could, as after a reset) and the rest of that lap after the jump, and a single segment way ahead of every other lap are not used. The rest of those laps still counts, and your fastest real lap always stays whole. To leave a lap out yourself, open its session in Telemetry: in the Overview's Timing table, the switch beside Load - Leave this lap out of the optimal lap - skips it. The lap stays in the session, and one more click counts it again. Build the optimal lap again after a change: one saved before keeps its old times.
With a reference loaded, the Coach tab opens with a summary: how much you lose over the lap, the three segments that carry most of it with their causes, and the one thing to fix first. Below it, every finding per segment: brake point, apex speed, throttle pickup, gear at the apex, steering corrections, re-applied brakes. Click a finding to zoom the map and traces to that segment.
New in 1.6: each finding is a drop-down. Its head says the turn, the severity and what it is about - Brake, Throttle, Gear, Speed, Steering; open it and the explanation comes first, then the measurements behind it as rows, the finding's own measure first. Opening a finding shows its channel on the chart. Steering corrections come last: the line, the braking and the throttle are where the time is.
New in 1.5.6: each segment finding names the cause and carries a card per measure (speed, line, brake, throttle, gear, RPM, steering). Click a measure to isolate its channel and zoom the chart and the map to that spot. The summary box folds to one line with the chevron in its corner. The map's + and - zoom in bigger steps, and the gear axis is numbered when the gear trace is on.
Overlays are live pages fed by the app. Two uses:
Nothing is drawn on the PS5 itself. Overlays follow your units (mph, °F) from Settings, or the picker above the cards sets the speed unit for one overlay on its own — it goes into the link, so a single OBS source can differ from the rest. Both shows km/h and mph at once, the second one small underneath, for viewers whose own game runs in the other unit.
Presets: Race Dash, Trace Dash, both with a live track map, Fuel per lap, tyres and telemetry, the real wheel, the delta, Driver Rating, Time on Track and more.
Settings › Overlays on other devices › tick Allow devices on this network to open overlays. Then, on the Overlays page, tick Link for another device and copy a card's link: it opens on any phone, tablet or computer on the same network. Only the overlays are reachable that way, only with such a link, and nothing can be changed from them; switching the setting off and on makes every old link stop working.
Windows asks whether to allow Traces on the network the first time; if that prompt was cancelled or never showed, the Settings card says so and Allow through Windows Firewall adds the rule (one administrator prompt). If a phone still cannot open a link, it is the network between the devices: both must be on the same one - a guest network, or "AP isolation" on the router, keeps devices apart.
New in 1.5.6: every ready-made card shows a picture of the overlay while driving; rest the pointer on a card to see it full size. Race Dash shows the session time, a live estimate of fuel laps left and the gap to your optimal lap, and fits an iPad upright. The Driver Rating overlay follows your own account unless Settings says otherwise.
Your dashboards are listed at the top of the Overlays page, each with its own link to open or copy.
Park the car on track so the game is sending telemetry, then pick a drill. Each drill draws a target line for one input (brake, throttle or steering); keep yours on it within the tolerance you choose. Drills are scored and saved in Traces only.
With Auto-upload on (Settings), every saved session goes to your online library. New uploads are public, so your laps count on the leaderboards; Settings changes the rule, and the lock in the Library hides any single session. Public laps appear on the leaderboards, where other drivers can load them as a reference.
If the icon says sign in again, your cloud session expired: sign out and back in and the queue resumes on its own.
Tyres. Which compound a lap was on is the driver's own answer — the telemetry never carries it — so a board shows one only where its driver filled it in, in the Library. The boards can be filtered by compound, and a lap whose driver has not said is left out of a filtered board rather than counted as a guess.
Public, private, and links. Public means the lap counts on the leaderboards and is listed there. Private means it is not listed — not that it cannot be reached: anyone holding a lap's address can open it, which is what makes sending one to another driver possible (section 12).
New in 1.6.5: each saved session sends its stretch of the app's activity log to the Traces team, so a problem you report can be looked at straight away. Sign-in tokens, e-mail addresses and your computer's user name are removed before anything leaves. Settings › Activity log switches it off.
Import lap in the Library asks where the lap comes from: this computer — a .edge file someone sent you, or one from your other machine — or the community, the laps other drivers have published. Either way it lands in the Library like any session, and can be opened or loaded as the reference.
The tabs across the top are the boards: the events (Daily Races, Time Trials, World Series, dg-edge) and Fastest laps, the quickest published lap per driver and car. TRACK and CAR narrow any of them, and the track of the session you have open is filled in for you. The GAP column is measured against the lap you have loaded, so a negative number is how much faster that driver was than you.
DRIVER, beside TRACK and CAR on Fastest laps, lists everyone who has published a lap — of that track, once one is picked — with how many sessions each of them has. Pick a name and the board is theirs alone.
Every lap in the cloud has an address. The link button on a Library row copies it; send that to another driver and they paste it into From a link, which says whose lap it is, the track, the car and the quickest lap on it before anything is downloaded. The whole address or the id on its own both work. If that lap is already in your Library it says so, instead of making you a second copy.
The star on any row follows that driver, and the Following tab is their laps — everyone you follow on one board, with TRACK and CAR still on it. Following is one-way and asks nothing of them: their laps are already published, and the star only decides whose this picker lists. Press it again to stop. On the website the same thing is the Follow button on the Drivers page.
The Recording page's Video tab records the PS5's picture alongside the telemetry, so a lap can be watched next to its data on the Performance tab, and two laps side by side.
A file, or a recording whose laps were not stamped: the picture opens on the Video tab with the tools on the left. Step the picture to the frame where the game's timer flips to 0:00 (← → move one frame, Shift for a second) and press Lap starts here; with the lap picked in Lap in that session, the end is set from the lap's time and the picture jumps to that frame, so you can check the timer flips there too. Start and End show their frames; Cut this lap writes the file.
The Replays tab shows every recording as a card: the track, the car, the best lap, how many laps were cut from it, and whether it was Recorded live or From a replay. Search by driver, track or car; All, To cut, Cut and No telemetry narrow the list, and Open a video brings in a file recorded elsewhere. Open on a card opens the recording: Tie a session (or Change session) says which session of the Library it belongs to, Cut every lap and Cut the fastest lap cut it from its stamps, and under it are the laps cut from it, each with the frame it starts and ends on. On a lap, Play plays its file, the pencil says which telemetry lap it is, the bookmark makes it the reference lap of its session, and the bin deletes the file; creators also have the cloud, which shares the video next to their lap on Traces. The videos live on this computer, in the library folder under replays/, and nothing goes to the cloud unless you share a lap. A raw recording is large, a couple of hundred MB a lap: once a lap is cut, Traces asks whether to drop the raw and keep only the lap files (about 20 MB each), and the eject button on the recording does the same later.
On the Telemetry page, a lap that has a video opens on Performance with the picture beside the map, in step with the playhead. Attach a reference lap that has a video too and the two-videos view shows both cars at the same point of the track.
New in 1.6.6: the Replays editor has an Untie button next to Change session. It unties the recording from its session in one click, after asking. The recording, its cut laps and the session all stay; Change session ties it again.
Settings › Look picks the theme: Blue (the app's own), Dark and Light. Every page, every chart and the map follow it.
New in 1.6: the look the app was moving to is the only one now. Try the new look is gone from Settings - the tighter layout, the bar across the top and the icon rail are simply the app. The theme still picks the colours it comes in.
Yes — Traces holds the console and passes the stream on. GT7 sends its telemetry to one app at a time, so the two must never both ask the console for it. This is the setup drivers run, and it needs no changes once it is in:
Latest Mode (C Format) is the one to pick: it is the packet Traces asks the console for, so it is the packet SimHub receives. After changing the mode, restart GT7, as SimHub says.
To check it, look at the green line under Save in Traces: it names every address receiving right now and counts the packets sent. 33739, 33740 and 33741 are Traces' own ports — Traces will not save a local address on one of them, which is why SimHub gets 33742.
Recommended: give the PlayStation a fixed IP on your router (a DHCP reservation). The console address in Traces then never changes, and a reconnect after a power cut is not a hunt for a new one. SimHub does not need it — it only ever talks to 127.0.0.1.
Do it this way round rather than letting SimHub forward to Traces. What SimHub forwards is a shorter packet with no steering angle in it, so Traces would have to estimate your steering instead of recording it. Pedal and haptic effects work the same either way.
They flag laps inside that session that are not ordinary flying laps. Hover any badge to see which laps it refers to. The same badges appear in the Library list and in the Telemetry compare picker.
Partial lap — the recording started or stopped partway through the lap, so part of it is missing. This is the one to watch out for: the charts scale each lap to its own distance, so a short lap gets stretched across the same axis and the delta and traces drift apart. Its sector times are not real either, so they never count as a best sector. Do not use a partial lap as a comparison reference.
Stopped — the car stopped mid-lap: a race interruption, a spin, or a paused session. The data is accurate, it simply is not a flying lap, so its time and traces are not comparable. A stop also splits the session into stints in the Telemetry view.
Pit stop — the car visited the pits during that lap. GT7 relocates the car when it rejoins the track, so the lap covers less distance than its time suggests, and its map and distance-based charts are not meaningful. A pit stop also marks the end of a stint.
Race start: the recording holds the start of a race, standing or rolling. When it covers the same lap as a grid start, only this badge shows. Informational, not a warning.
Grid start — the first lap of a race. It begins on the grid, past the start/finish line, so it covers less than a full circuit. Nothing is missing and nothing went wrong — it just is not a like-for-like comparison lap. Informational, not a warning.
Incomplete — the lap does not close (its start and end positions do not meet) and the data does not say why. Rare; treat it like a partial lap when picking references.
Every colour used across the Telemetry, Coach, and Recording maps and charts. These are stable — the same channel uses the same hue everywhere.
The shapes dotted along the racing line on the track maps flag the key moments of every corner — where you start braking, where the car is slowest, and where you pick the throttle back up. They're the same three points the Coach analyses, so you can read a corner at a glance.
Read together they tell the story of a corner: brake (red) → coast down to the slowest point (white) → feed the throttle back in (green). A later brake triangle or an earlier throttle circle than your reference lap is usually where the time comes from.
The Lines pill at the bottom left of the track map toggles what's drawn on it. The first group controls your loaded lap; once a reference lap is loaded for comparison, a second group appears after a divider and controls the reference lap the same way. The Map pill at the top right has zoom, Fit the whole track and Follow car. Lit buttons are on, dimmed are off.
Tip: the reference group only appears while a comparison lap is loaded — if you only see one set of buttons, load a lap to compare against from the Compare picker first.
The modes on the Recording page and what each one does.
GT7's UDP telemetry stream is delivered at ~60 Hz — one packet roughly every 16.7 ms. When a car crosses a sector boundary between two packets, the app interpolates linearly between the two position samples to estimate the exact crossing time.
Because the car doesn't follow a perfectly straight path between samples, this linear estimate carries an inherent error of ±1–2 ms. The game computes crossing times internally at a much higher rate using its physics engine, so its displayed sector times are more precise.
There is no way to improve beyond ±1–2 ms accuracy without access to higher-frequency position data from the game. This affects all telemetry apps that read GT7 UDP data.
Sector times are computed in whole milliseconds, and the last sector is adjusted to make the total equal the authoritative lap finish time. So the sum is always exact, but individual sector boundaries may still be 1–2 ms away from what the game reports — due to the interpolation limit described above.
Each sector boundary is defined as a line segment running from the inner edge to the outer edge of the track. At each telemetry tick, the app computes the car's signed perpendicular distance to that line. When the sign flips (car crosses the line), it linearly interpolates between the two ticks to find the fractional crossing time.
This is the same method used for live sector detection during driving. Sector boundaries are saved in the Admin → Tracks tab.
The auto-scan tries to bind to UDP port 33740 to listen for broadcast replies. If the app is already connected, that port is held by the active telemetry listener — the scan is skipped and the known IP is returned immediately.
If you see this message while not connected, make sure GT7 is running and the PS5 is on the same network as this computer. GT7 has no setting to turn on: Traces asks the console for telemetry itself.
When auto-connect is enabled in Settings, the app checks on launch whether it is already connected. If not, it uses the last saved PS5 IP to reconnect. If no IP is saved, it broadcasts a scan packet to find the console automatically.
GT7 sends telemetry at approximately 60 Hz (one UDP packet per frame). All recorded data — speed, throttle, brake, position, etc. — is at this resolution. Time-sensitive calculations such as sector crossings are limited by this sample rate.
Yes. GT7 streams the same UDP telemetry format during replays. Lap recording and analysis work the same way, though replay scrubbing may cause brief gaps or duplicate data in the stream.
Short reference on the core skills the Coach tab's lap-feedback detector flags. Read this when you don't have a session loaded — these are the things to aim for.
Brake in a straight line where possible. Hit peak pressure early, then release smoothly into the corner (trail-brake) so weight stays on the front while you turn in.
Lifting off the brake too fast unloads the nose and washes you wide; staying on too long past the apex chokes the exit.
Pick up the throttle progressively from the apex. Snapping to 100% before the car is pointed straight overworks the rear tyres and forces a lift — losing more time than the few extra metres of full throttle ever gain.
Aim for a long, smooth ramp from apex to exit.
One smooth input per corner. Mid-corner corrections (sawing the wheel) almost always cost time — they signal that the entry speed or brake release was off.
Unwind the wheel as the throttle goes on; tightening lock under power is a slide waiting to happen.
Wide on entry, late apex, track-out wide on exit. The geometric line maximises corner radius; a late apex sacrifices entry speed for a faster, straighter exit — almost always the right trade on corners followed by a straight.
The exception: corners followed by another corner the same direction (carry minimum speed, not exit speed).
Downshift while braking, not while turning — shift-shock mid-corner upsets the car. One gear too high lugs the engine out of the powerband; one too low spikes RPM and risks lockup on downshift.
Practise releasing the brake as you let the clutch out so weight transfers are smooth.
Most laps lose time in the slow-corner exits, not on the straight. Compare your delta segment-by-segment: if you're losing 0.2 s in a single corner, the fix is there — usually in throttle application timing rather than top speed.
The Telemetry tab's segment deltas are the fastest way to find your worst corner.