Why the spotter refuses to guess
Ask PONNE’s race engineer “do I make it on fuel?” early in a run and it may answer: “I need a couple more green laps to trust the burn.”
That refusal is the most important feature in the product, and this post is about the mechanism behind it — because “our AI is accurate” is a claim, and claims are cheap. This is structure.
The problem with putting a language model in a race car
Language models are confident. Ask one a fuel question and it will produce a number, because producing plausible text is what they do. On a website that’s an annoyance. At 250 km/h, three laps from a pit window, a confidently wrong litre count loses you the race — and you’d have no way to know which answers to trust.
So the model is never allowed to do the maths
In PONNE, every number comes from a tool — a plain, deterministic function reading your live telemetry: fuel burn per lap, gap ahead, pit-window laps, stint pace. The AI’s job is to decide which tools to call and to narrate the results like a human engineer would. It’s the voice, not the calculator.
And then it’s checked anyway
After the model composes its answer, a post-check scans the reply for every digit and compares it against the numbers the tools actually returned. A number that no tool produced — even one — and the answer is rejected. The model gets one retry, with the offending number quoted back at it. If it fails again, the reply is thrown away and replaced with a template built purely from the tool results. There is no path from the model’s imagination to your ears.
Honesty goes deeper than the check
When the data itself is thin — too few clean laps to trust the fuel burn — the tools refuse, and the refusal is a first-class answer: “a couple more green laps.” The engineer telling you it doesn’t know yet is the feature. And every answer keeps its receipt: the app shows which tools ran and what they returned, so you can audit any call it makes.
The bet
Sim racers are technical people. One invented number, caught once, and a coaching tool is dead to you — as it should be. So PONNE is built so the interesting question isn’t “was it right?” but “where did that number come from?” — and there’s always an answer.