The Le Mans Ultimate community has raised questions after the sim racing title and its Motorsport Games publisher, published today (4th November), implemented automatic rate limiting and IP banning for what it terms “out of normal requests”.
It follows several third-party data-scraping services appearing online, where after logging in with a Steam account, users can track past race results, plus safety rating and driver rating changes.
This can be useful and interesting information, something that Le Mans Ultimate’s native RaceControl service (currently) doesn’t offer.
However, some of these new platforms are scraping player data without permission, meaning LMU player stats, without player knowledge, can be accessed publicly.
Another challenge has been impersonating sim racers via Steam’s authorisation service (using Steam to log in), and using their account to repeatedly request player data. This in turn flags that account as suspicious, as it requests thousands of data points, and could incorrectly lead to an unwitting player ban.
These requests lead to millions of API calls for Motorsport Games, which in turn, it has to pay for. The sheer quantity could also lead to backend instabilities for all drivers.
AI-powered vibe coding tools such as Loveable, which use Anthropic’s Claude language model, have made it relatively straightforward to create platforms such as these LMU-specific stat trackers.
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