PUBG Racing Mode brought chaotic vehicle combat to Miramar: pick a weaponized ride, hit checkpoints, grab boosts, and sprint to the finish.

Back in 2021, PUBG LABS handed us the keys to something gloriously strange: Racing Mode. In 2026, I still think about it the way I think about a road trip I barely survived. It was not a permanent playlist. It was a short LABS experiment on Miramar, TPP only, and it asked a simple question: what if the Battlegrounds stopped being a slow, tense chess match and became a screaming, metal-on-sand sprint? I buckled up. I picked a vehicle. I learned that a race track can absolutely have a personality.

The garage was the first gamble

At race start, I selected my vehicle from a small but spicy menu: Motorcycle, Buggy, Coupe RB, Dirt Bike, and Mirado. Each one came with its own set of weapons, which meant the choice was never just about speed. It was about attitude. Did I want to be a mosquito on two wheels, or a loud little problem in something with four?

On PC, I tapped F8 to toggle the vehicle selection UI. On console, the same idea lived on D-Pad down. Changing vehicles felt like flipping through trading cards while the clock breathed down my neck. Upon respawning, my selected vehicle spawned with me. Players spawned inside their vehicles as the race countdown began, and until the race started, we could not move or attack other players. That frozen moment was beautiful in its own way. Engines idling. Miramar’s sand is patient, but the track is not.

Once the match started, the instruction was simple: destroy anything in your path. I took that personally.

Two tracks, one direction, zero calm

Racing Mode took place on one of two tracks. Both were one-way, with a static start and finish line. That one-way design mattered. It turned every corner into a commitment and every bad line into a small confession. The track did not care about my plans. It just waited to see whether I could hold them.

Checkpoints were the spine of the race. They served as respawn points, and I had to drive through them to progress. The checkpoints are stern little gatekeepers: ignore them and the race quietly stops making sense. Going off-track for too long engaged an out-of-bounds timer, and when that countdown hit zero, I was respawned near the latest checkpoint I had passed. No shame in admitting that I met that timer more than once. The desert has a way of inviting bad decisions.

Red crates, blue crates, and the art of sending it

Driving through red crates collected boosts. I could engage a boost with the Shift key, and using it brought me to FULL-SPEED. Send it. That was the fantasy. Loud, silly, pure speed. When I was killed, I respawned with my boost gauge set to max, which felt like the mode patting me on the helmet and saying, try again, champ. Motorcycles and Dirt Bikes could not use boosts, so their players lived a different, lighter kind of chaos.

Blue crates gave ammo. Each one provided a small amount of ammo for my equipped weapon, and ammo crates respawned a short time after being collected. The red crates practically wink at you, but the blue crates are the quiet friends who keep the party going. I learned to sweep through them whenever my trigger finger got too confident.

The finish line and the after-party

The first player to cross the finish line grabbed the checkered flag and won the race for their squad. Sixty seconds after the winner crossed, the match ended. That minute was a strange little victory lap: part celebration, part cleanup, part chaos as everyone remembered there were still vehicles and weapons in the world.

The original LABS windows

Racing Mode ran over two weeks, with Squads first and Solo second. Here is how the original 2021 windows looked:

Platform	Week 1	Week 2
PC	Squads: June 3, 11 am – June 7, 4 pm KST	Solo: June 7, 16:30 – June 14, 16:00 KST
Console	Squads: June 10 after maintenance – June 14, 16:00 KST	Solo: June 14, 16:30 – June 21, 16:00 KST

Miramar, TPP only. Squad mode in the first week, Solo mode in the second. There was a match time limit, and the lobby sizes were specific:

Setting	PC	Console
Max players	20	16
Min players, Squad	12	12
Min players, Solo	8	8

LABS games did not provide XP for gameplay rewards. LABS gameplay did not count toward Career stats. It did not count toward Survivor Pass mission progress. LABS gameplay did not provide BP or additional rewards. In other words, the mode was not a grind. It was a playground. 🏁

Why I still remember it

In 2026, Racing Mode feels like a perfect snapshot of what LABS could be: an idea that did not need to be permanent to leave a mark. It was messy, fast, and a little unfair in the best way. The garage gave me a choice. The checkpoints kept me honest. The crates gave me hope. And the finish line gave me a story.

I still hear the boost. I still see the sand. And I still think the best races are the ones where you buckle up, laugh at your own driving, and send it anyway. 🚗💨