Night bike race: set your rider, bike and the track

Leaning into a bend under floodlights with a pack of riders around you is a thrill most of us only see on television. Night bike race in Screensavers by Zaweba puts you in a chase view just behind your own motorbike, racing at night on an endless track of bends. Other riders lean into the corners around you, and sponsor boards and floodlights flash past at the side of the track.

It's in the night pack, with dark surroundings lit by the floodlights. Its settings are among the richest in the app, because you can choose your own bike, suit and helmet colours as well as the race itself.

Shaping the race

Speed sets how fast you ride. A lower speed lets you see the track and the riders clearly. A high one feels like a proper race.

Other bikes runs from 0 to 16. With none, you ride alone, which is calm and lets you enjoy the bends and the lights. With sixteen, you're in the middle of a crowded pack. A handful of rivals is a good balance on a smaller screen.

How twisty sets the shape of the track. A gentle track has long sweeping bends. A twisty one has bend after bend, with the bikes leaning hard one way then the other.

Blur settings

Distance blur softens things far down the track, which helps the scene feel deep and keeps the eye on what's near. Motion blur smears things that move quickly past, which makes the speed feel real. Both add to the sense of racing, but too much of either can look smudged on a sharp, large monitor. Try them on, then ease them back if the picture looks muddy.

Your own colours

You can set the colours of your bike, your suit and your helmet. That makes it your rider. Fans can copy the colours of a favourite rider or team, and children enjoy picking their own. There's also a setting for slowly changing colours, with its own speed, so the bike, suit and helmet drift through colours over time rather than staying fixed.

Picking your colours is best done with the live preview in the manager open, since you're right behind the bike and its colours fill a good part of the view.

Trying and setting it

When the preview looks right, use Preview full screen to check the race at real size. Speed and blur are hard to judge in a small window, so this step matters here more than for most screensavers. The preview closes as soon as you move the mouse or press any key.

Then Use this screensaver builds it into your profile with no administrator rights needed and opens Windows' Screen Saver Settings for the wait time and password option. Settings are read whenever the screensaver starts, so you can repaint your bike later without any rebuild. On several monitors, choose a race on each, one race stretched across them all, or the main monitor only with the others black.

Keeping it watchable

High speed, a very twisty track, lots of bikes and strong motion blur all at once can be hard to look at for long. If it feels too much, lower the speed first, then the twistiness. On a laptop, set the frame cap in Install and options to 30 frames per second and let the battery saver blank the screen when the charge is low.

Night bike race shares its floodlit circuit with Night open wheel race, which swaps the bikes for open-wheel race cars. Tick both, and Night motorway too, in Install several for a random night of racing and driving. Reset to defaults takes everything back to how it started.