Some websites don’t die. They just change into something else.
At the end of 2023 I wrote about my Sim Racing Vault website. A place where console racers could share and find free setups for Assetto Corsa Competizione. Earlier this year I said goodbye to it.
But the domain stayed. And there is something new living on it now.
This post is about going back to an old project, letting go of the old code, and rebuilding the idea with AI.
Where it started
Sim Racing Vault started out of frustration. If you wanted to be fast in ACC on console, you either had to be very good at car setups, or you had to buy them.
So I built a site where people could share setups for free.
I built it the traditional way. PHP 8, MySQL and Bootstrap, running on Nginx on my home server. Coded in Nova on my MacBook, with Bootstrap Studio, phpMyAdmin, MAMP Pro and GitLab CE on my NAS for version control.
The part I was most proud of was the setup converter. It turned PC setup files into values you could use on console. To make that work, I compiled one large JSON base file with all the car specific parameters. That took me weeks. And every time a new car came to console, I had to add it by hand, there was no AI to help me back then.
Why the old site had to go
Three things changed.
- ACC lost its spark. It is simply not that popular anymore. Most racers moved on.
- Le Mans Ultimate is PC only. The new favorite does not run on console, so a console setup site has nobody to serve.
- Fewer people share setups. The library stopped growing, and a sharing site without sharing is just an archive.
The code still worked. The problem it solved was gone.
A new itch
The new idea came from my own racing.
A group of friends and I race together on our own Assetto Corsa server. F1 cars first, later GT3 time trials too. Week after week we chased personal bests.
But every time we reset the server, the laptimes were gone. No history. No comparison. No way to know if you actually got faster.
Because we run our own server, we have access to its API. My friend “The BishMan” took care of the server side and hosts it on his own server farm. I took on the application: a tracker that stores laptimes outside the game, automatically, so the data lives even when the server doesn’t.
Rebuild, don’t patch
I could have bolted this onto the old PHP code. I didn’t.
Instead I started from scratch, with Claude Code. Same approach as my VibeCode Challenge: I describe what I want, steer the AI, and it writes the code.
I did not write a single line myself. The numbers today:
- About 33,100 lines of code
- 9,071 lines of PHP across 66 files
- 6,515 lines of JavaScript across 16 files
- 12,685 lines of HTML across 18 pages
- 50+ API endpoints
For a hobby project, that is a lot of code I never typed.
Meet LapTimer
Once the server tracker worked, I wanted more. What about times from other sims? That question turned into LapTimer, the heart of the new Simrace Vault.
Same car. Same track. Different simulator.
What it does:
- Post your laptimes from any sim, or let our server import them automatically.
- You decide who sees them. Just you, specific people, or the whole community.
- Back it up with telemetry if you want to prove a time. It runs on honesty, like the sim racing community does.
- Filter by game, circuit and car class.
- Track vs Class compares the fastest class times on a track in one chart.
- Time Trial Events follow multi-race series with live points standings and leaderboards per race.
What I learned revisiting old code with AI
A project is not its code. The code of the old site was fine. The world around it changed. Revisiting old work starts with the question: is the problem still there?
Keep the idea, drop the implementation. The heart of Sim Racing Vault was always “help racers get faster, together”. That idea survived. Almost nothing of the old code did, and that is fine.
Rebuilding is now cheaper than patching. In 2023 a rebuild would have cost me months of evenings. With AI, starting fresh was the faster route.
Your own itch is the best spec. I did not build LapTimer for an audience. I built it because our laptimes kept disappearing. That made every decision easy.
Domain knowledge still matters. AI writes the code, but it doesn’t know how sim racers think about cars, classes and fair comparisons. That part is still on me.
Try it
LapTimer is live at simracevault.com/LapTimer. You can browse laptimes without an account. Want to post your own? Request early access and start comparing.
Read the full background on the About page.
The old Sim Racing Vault was a hand-built site for a game and a community that moved on. The new one is an AI-built tool for how I race today.
Same domain. Same goal of helping racers get faster. Completely new code.
That is what revisiting old code looks like for me now. You don’t have to keep maintaining the past. You keep the idea, and you rebuild the rest.