I'm not actually sure if disabling collision is actually an advantage in this game as some of the faster ways to hold on to boost involve bouncing off an NPC car or scenery object. I'll have to test these out to be sure though.

I feel like it would be obvious if a run was disabling collision as I don't think I've ever seen a run on the leaderboards that avoided hitting a car at least once.

As for the runs, most people have submitted times that were done on a Twitch/Youtube live stream. I guess a rule could be made to go back to the main menu on resets but it would make doing runs extremely tedious with how often resets happen when going for pb's.

So I've been looking to run the US version of the game some more. I few nights ago I ran a 3:39.680 (+0.89WR). US clock runs about 25% faster than the JP rom so real-time loss was maybe 6 tenths? Just wanted to show that these times are something I can hit consistently to disprove any doubt that I'm not submitting real time runs.

R1 - 1'15"32 faster than WR R3 - 1'17"79 lost time hitting losing boost before tunnel R5 - 1'06"56 could have been faster if I held boost at the end but hit grass

Something to bear in mind is that on Easy, traffic seems to always spawn in the same place if you drive the same each time. I don't play Normal enough to know any difference and on Hard, steering + acceleration is nerfed and as for traffic, you get a moment where things seem the same but it just turns into praying for RNG to be in your favor.

Nope, not tool assisted. Carkiller15 actually recreated his tool assisted run after I beat his old 3:39:380 TAS from 2019. You can watch his new TAS of this stage here

Nice work! All stages is a huge undertaking with how unforgiving the game can be when it comes to collision.

Carkiller, Do you happen to know off hand what the fastest routes are for each of the stages? I think I'm going to start running the other stages again to make them more optimized and get the Easy runs in for stage 3,4 instead of the Hard versions I have up there now.

I'm thinking that the current routes that are run are already fastest but since I know you've TAS'd stage 1, I wasn't sure if you happened to test any of the other ones.

Bro..... the blood, the sweat, the tears. But I've finally beaten both your TAS runs with an R1,R3,R5 run using the shifter trick in some parts. I'll be uploading and submitting soon.

I know you did the shadow checks as apart of the entertainment of the run but I still feel like this was a major accomplishment. I'm sure you could make something in the 37 or 36s with another TAS.

What a snipe! I'll have to remember that one.

Is there a static # to the times you can shift before the car loses speed? There's times where it seems like I can keep it at 330 km/h for what feels like a very long time and others where you stop slowing down within 5 shifts.

Also I've seen from the runs I've been doing that if you shift while boosting on tarmac, you slow down to 330km/h and while off track, most of the time you get down to 314km/h. There also seems to be places where attempting gear gacha just doesn't work. I think it has to do with bushes that are placed off track but I haven't tested that theory.