This guide assumes that you understand the base mechanics and map layouts and will be working from there. Hopefully this guide will have some information and tech that can help players who are both struggling to hit top 100 start competing with some of the top times, but also the players who are near the top figure out the differences that makes current WR’s so much faster than them. This guide will not go over how to go over shortcuts or many specific track tips, but giving overall ideas that can help you improve in any track you play.

Generally, the biggest difference between people’s times are simply their driving line and how and where they drift. You can be stuck getting similar times over and over and then realize that the reason you can’t beat a particular time is not because “I just need to go a little faster” or “If I drift this tighter” but ends up just being your general strategy on how many and where your drifts are, or how you deal with obstacles. The easiest example of this is Learning Garage where despite the track being very short with no shortcuts, the times are very different between players.
A general strategy on how to approach almost any track, is that you spend the first 15-ish seconds non-stop chaining drifts (basically until you hit as high of a speed as you can control for the given map, some may require much lower or higher amounts of speed) while keeping as tight of a line as possible, and the rest of the track is just to maintain your speed and using your drifts to keep yourself from flying off the track instead of building more speed.
For the line, you just need to know the track layout and figure out the shortest line possible and try your best to follow it with your drifts the best you can.
At the beginning of the track, you want to plan out your drifts to make sure that as you are chaining your drifts together, when it comes time to make a turn you are already drifting in that direction. You can plan this by remembering “okay at the start of the race I start with a left drift and by the time I do 3 yellow boosts I will be drifting the right way again to make this turn up ahead really tight. You can follow this ideology for the rest of the track too, remembering how many drifts and where you need to place them in order to maneuver the track. Theoretically the first section of every track should have everyone with an almost identical pace because it’s all about strategy instead of skill for the first couple sections of any race, and if you are falling significantly behind you are probably doing something nonoptimal and should check what other people are doing. It would not be unwise to race against the top time for a track and just copy exactly what they do.
Here is the beginning of Liberty Island. You start with alternating left and right yellow drifts because that will keep you going as straight as possible down straight paths while drifting. You start with a left to make it so when it is time to make the next turn, you will already be turning that direction to hug the corner. Then a quick right drift to counter the left turning you did before and doing after, if this drift was a right you would either not make it around the next corner because you will be aiming towards the edge or would have to go very wide. Then you follow up with a blue boost because you don’t have the space to fit left and right yellow drifts through the small straight part after turn 2. Then you end the section with a bunch of blue right turns as it is all just going the same direction.

Drifting does so much more than just build speed and make you turn sharper. Drifting is your method of keeping yourself from flying off the track because it sticks your wheels to the ground. This can keep you from getting air when going quickly up or down (jumping is generally not ideal) and can help you manage getting over and through obstacles like uneven roads or pushing cars out of the way without flipping into the air.
The most common thing you will need to do is drifting when going up a ramp to a higher platform. As long as you are drifting as you go over the hump at the top of the ramp you should be able to keep yourself from catching air as long as you are not going too fast. A trick to going over these ramps at higher speeds is the angle at which you go over. If you drift over them at sharper angles, since your car is going upwards at a slower rate you will be less likely to be launched into the air.

Generally, the more time you spend on the ground instead of the air, the better. Staying on the ground will allow you to be going faster, turn earlier, and keep chain drifting as opposed to being in the air where you can’t do anything. It is debatable whether when you are approached with a jump whether it is faster to slow down and land early, or go full speed and land later depending on what comes after the jump. The one thing that is clearly worse, is braking in the air. By going over a jump fast and then slowing down in the air, you will still get the same amount of airtime as going fast but also cover less distance with your jump, the worst of both worlds. Don’t airbrake unless you absolutely have to. On the topic of jumping, something that ends up being an annoyance is having your car tilt when going over jumps. I don’t have an easy solution to this as every jump is different, each car handles it differently, what angle you go up, and it can change depending on your speed and if you are neutral, braking, or accelerating on the ramp. It’s best to just try out different things and see what works.

Drifting gives you a set time of boost, yellow sparks giving you a very small amount, and blue giving you a large amount. These stack to fill up your boost up to a certain amount. There are a few ways this ends, there is the obvious “you ran out of boost” which is indicated by the fire out of your exhaust pipe turning from white, to yellow, to red, to none.
The second way your boost dies is if you start a drift and it ends in any other way besides you releasing it yourself. This usually happens when you go into the air while drifting. While your car's wheels do stick to the ground, your car chassis does get affected. If your suspension is stretched to the limit from the wheels and chassis being too far away, the wheels will unstick from the ground and return to the chassis leaving you in the air. Each car has its own limit to how much the suspension will stretch. The third way is if your speed drops below the speed it takes to start a drift without holding the accelerator. This means that if you brake too hard it will cut out your chain. But this also means that no matter how slow you are going due to obstacles, as long as you are accelerating you won’t lose your boost chain. You are even capable of boosting against a wall at 0 speed as long as you are holding the accelerator. This introduces a strategy in certain desperate situations where if you know you are about to crash into something, instead of slowing down to lessen the impact, you accelerate instead to prevent yourself from losing your boost chain.

The fourth way is if your car spends too much time in an “unalignment state”. Walaber described this state as a “state where the car's front is not pointing in the intended direction” where the thresholds are: if there was a recent collision and the car nose is more than 25 degrees off from where it should be, and if there was no collision your car is more than 50 degrees off. This basically means your car is not facing the direction it is actively going. This usually occurs when you are jumping and your car tilts up or down, or when you are drifting incredibly sharply.

This is probably one of the least obvious but also the most important mechanic in the game. While yes, your top speed gets raised by drifting, yellow giving ~2mph/3kph and blue giving you ~4mph/6kph, your top speed is actually determined solely on the speed you are going when you release your drift.This means that if you are going 200kph, start a drift, brake until you are going 50kph, you will find that all of a sudden you are not capable of going past something like 80kph.The exact values are unknown, and part of me thinks it’s a percentage thing, but the knowledge that this exists is really all that matters.
This means that your goal when trying to gain speed is that you want to make sure you are going as fast as possible when you release the drift. It does not matter how slow you are going when you are driving, when you start a drift, during the drift, or anything else. When coming out of a turn, you want to speed up and straighten out before you release your drift. The reason you want to straighten out is because your speed is calculated by the speed you are going relative to which way your car is facing. So if you are drifting sharply, you will actually notice that your speedometer says you are going a lot slower than you actually are since your car is traveling nearly sideways. Below is a demonstration of this where the red arrow is where the car is traveling while the blue arrow shows which way the car is facing.

On the topic of going as fast as possible when ending drifts, you also want to make sure that you are not doing it in moments where your speed dips. This includes times such as fighting against gravity going up ramps, when you are bouncing from uneven ground, or slamming into obstacles or walls. You want to wait until you are clear to be at top speed before releasing the drift, even if it means waiting a second after your drift sparks turn blue.
By actively keeping this in mind you will start to realize more than ever that you are going way too fast to even try to control your car. You can also use this knowledge of how your top speed is calculated to your advantage in the opposite way. You can lower your top speed if you need to as well by doing a drift and purposely slowing down when you release it, or even just going 80% of your top speed so that when you release it you will be going a similar speed as pre-drift. This is an important technique, and one you probably do without realizing it when going through very technical maps like San Francisco.

You can even use this knowledge to salvage when your boost cuts out. Say you lost your chain but you are still going fast, if you quickly do a drift and boost, your top speed will be reset to your current speed instead of restarting from zero.

When going incredibly fast, there are 2 things that will start limiting you (besides crashing). One is that there will be obstacles or sections that require you to deal with going slower. There is actually a cool way to deal with situations where you have to quickly slow down a lot after a drift (which when you are going very fast you are usually forced to drift constantly so this actually comes up a bit). If you aren’t pressing the accelerator when you release a drift, you will not rocket out of the drift, you will slow down while your top speed still gets raised as normal. This way you can still raise your top speed while simultaneously slowing down. This can be super helpful for situations where you are forced to drift, but then have to immediately go slow, followed by a section that you want to go fast. Below is a video of me going into neutral, releasing the drift, then braking. Watch the speedometer.

The other thing you will notice is that since you are going very fast, your drifts take up a lot of space to perform since you are required to at least hit yellow sparks to continue a chain. So if you come across a section with many tight turns, you suddenly don’t have the room to do a full speed drift, forcing you to slow down. But slowing down during turns makes you lower your top speed, right? There are 2 things that can help mitigate this. One is using a single drift to cover multiple turns. By using your speed to your advantage, you can drift very wide and cover multiple turns that are going the same way. A good place for this is the very beginning of New Orleans lap 2. Instead of going left through the first checkpoint, then right and then right again down the ramp, you can come in on the right side of the finish line and then do one big right drift starting from the first checkpoint all the way around to down the ramp. This not only eliminates the need to make time and space to do 2 drifts, but also makes it so you are already turning into the second turn before you reach it and with a maxed out drift.

The other way you deal with this is a very intricate dance with the brake and accelerator. If you are forced to take each turn with a drift then there is a way to optimally do it so you come out as fast as you can. Think of the bottom floor of New Orleans where you have to go around the pillars. You just need to keep in mind that your top speed is calculated by how fast you are going at the end of your drift and that it doesn’t matter how slow you go at any other point. So on these multiple quick turns: you want to be braking when you drift, then speed up right before releasing your drift, and then immediately braking and drifting again. Then cycle that until you are through it. The goal is to be going slow to give yourself time and space to get sparks on your drift and then going as fast as possible given the space you have to keep your top speed high. This can be tricky and different maps must be done in different ways, but hopefully you should be able to come out of it going about as fast as you went into the section.

I’m going to quickly cover how to take hairpin turns or any other turns that you need to cut sharply. If you are already going slow then you don’t have to worry about this, just take them close and sharply. But if you are going fast there is a way to do it best.
For most of these kinds of turns, you want to go into the turn with braking as late as possible, that way you complete the previous stretch of track of the race as fast as possible. You want to time it so that as you get to what you need to go around, you will be going slow enough to closely hug whatever you are going around. For something very tight like the hairpin turn in Seattle you want to maintain a speed just above where your boost will cut out. There is actually a simple way of doing this by drifting without using the accelerator or brake. When you are in neutral during a drift your car will slow down and then as it approaches the minimum speed required to drift, it stays there for a while before it will actually dip too low. That way you won’t need to try to manually manage a particular speed yourself because at high top speeds trying to keep yourself at a low speed can be incredibly difficult due to the fact that a single tap of the accelerator can rocket you into a wall. In this clip it does not seem like a big deal, and I do not do it for very long, but this can greatly help you deal with tight sections like this. I frequently have moments around certain turns where I stay in neutral while drifting if I want to stay slow.

Then once you are clear to speed up after you are around the turn, do it. There are also a couple cases where you are able to speed up before you even finish the turn. I want to give this example on the second parking garage in Minnesota where you have to make back to back hairpin turns but you have a lot of space. On these turns you are able to make it around the corner and then speed up before you are finished turning to make yourself aimed at where you need to go. This way you continue to make the turn but also make progress down the track while also keeping a very tight line.

I also want to go over high speed spirals like Chicago lap 2. You can manage your speed by using the method I explained before of staying neutral during your drift. You don’t have to worry about actually going fast during these sections since going faster doesn’t make you turn faster. Your goal is to just keep holding the turn and surviving while not losing your boost chain. You are able to just stay neutral while drifting and then occasionally adjusting your speed by ever so slightly tapping your accelerator or brake down just 10% for a moment. You can see in the video below by doing this I can keep myself between 30-50MPH.

There are 5 that I am going to cover: drift dropping, boost storing, wall grinding, wall bouncing, and sliding.
The first one is simple, but letting go of a drift right as you are falling off of a platform, it will still register as you getting the boost, but since your wheels (or most of them at least) aren’t touching the ground you will not speed up which would have caused you to get more air. The drift itself can also help prevent you from getting airtime since it also tries to stick you to the ground so it helps pull you down. This is incredibly useful on the Seattle jump and the Chicago rooftop dropdown. You are able to go over these at high speeds without worrying about not making it under whatever you need to clear.

Boost storing is when you start a drift and it gets cut out from you getting airtime causing your chain to end, but when you land and drift again the drift progress picks up where you left off. This is generally not a technique that you plan to use (which may change if we get some really technical tracks) but can be used to save yourself when using the previous technique. If you try drifting off a drop down and don’t get the boost, when you land you can drift again super quickly and you can save your speed.

So walls can be your friend sometimes. One way you can use a wall to your advantage is by drifting alongside it. If you are trying to drift and you are going to hit a wall that is running parallel to where you are going, instead of slowing down to avoid it you are able to accelerate and grind your car against it. This can make it so you keep going fast around areas where you normally would have to slow down for. You just want to make sure yourself off of the wall before you let go of the drift.

The other way the walls can be helpful is by bouncing off of them with the back of your car in time with a boost. This is a relatively unexplored method where if you are drifting very fast and you come across a wall to where the back of your car will hit it, if you keep accelerating and release the drift in time with hitting the wall you will quickly transfer all your speed into forward momentum. I’m pretty sure if done properly this can generate extra speed than normal. This is a good way to quickly transfer momentum from a drift into the direction you want to go.

The final thing I’m going to cover is sliding. Sliding has not been used very much until recently and is an incredibly powerful tool. So how it works is that once you reach a certain speed and you pull only inwards when drifting while accelerating, your car will start losing traction and slide sideways. Normally this is bad because you would lose control, speed, and not make the turn. But if you are in a situation where you can keep accelerating and pulling inwards, you will begin rapidly increasing your speed more than you should be able to. It’s difficult to find places to do it since it requires a lot of space, but this is still being experimented with and more will be discovered with this. A good example of where this works well is the rainbow spiral in Liberty Island. You are able to drift and keep pulling inwards and as long as you don’t bump the railings you will be going ludicrous speeds by the end.