The race is on a loop, you only pass each point one time. You get from the starting place and return there, passing at each point 1 time, what would be the shortest/fastest path? That’s the problem.

You can probably put weights on the fuel efficiency, based on the cargo weight, distance/speed he can drive (based on the experience and expected value for him), fueling stops, etc. Just add that to A* and some tinkering, I think you could make a good algorithm.

I think this is about the travelling salesman math/computer science problem:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Travelling_salesman_problem

A good video about this:

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=GiDsjIBOVoA

I use msys2 (https://www.msys2.org/), it uses pacman as its package manager and has a lot of developer packages (so i can compile fortran and integrating it to python). It comes with bash and a terminal, but I used windows terminal and made a profile for using msys2’s bash, the same on vscode. Then I installed neofetch (https://packages.msys2.org/base/neofetch) and just saw this hahaha.