That part about motivation was outstanding. I am pasting it below in case folks missed it.
"Of course, we come into this with modest ambitions: make humans obsolete in the process of racing Trackmania. Perhaps we’ll be featured in the cover of a scientific journal to show how AI now dominates all racing sports. The kind of thing we can reasonably expect when entering a project with no directly relevant experience.
Obviously, logically, we know that this kind of oversized ambition isn’t realistic. No one at Google is going to see this and say “They really do need eight billion dollars in cloud credits for the noble task of racing emulated cars.” But having ludicrous ambitions is a key aspect for avoiding the thing that kills most projects: ennui. For us, if a project is merely aiming to be “kind of good” then it’s not going to go anywhere, because being “kind of good” is not exciting. So we trick our brains: we envision the realistic best case scenario (a pretty good racing program) and multiply it by a thousand. Is it grounded? No. But when you’re spending eight hours trying to figure out how to configure virtual desktops over ssh, you need something to keep you going. When every block you put down is a step towards a towering edifice, setbacks feel smaller, and wins feel like they’re worth something more.
So, that’s always been how we approach the early days of these projects, with unrealistic goals that we “know” are impossible. Once its potential starts to materialize, once you have the shape of the work laid down, then you can start to discard the grandiose for the grounded, and then you can start to take those castles in the clouds and boil them down into the bricks of the house. Projects like this are a long haul. We’ve already spent four full months trying to get TM2020 and OpenPlanet both installed. If you don’t have a good goal, you won’t have a reason to make it off the starting line."
I do love Trackmania. I'd like to play 2020 but alas I do not have a compatible computer. I mostly play the Wii version.