There are currently five lap skips in the game, and here they all are sorted from easiest to hardest.
[The Buzzcut] [Discovered by: Itself] [Difficulty: Easy] [Time save: 120 seconds] Yep, a lap skip so easy that the game revealed it for us. During one of ssecnirp's runs, a rubber banding Buzz Wagon crashed next to the bridge, clipped through the fence and then triggered the lap counter. It didn't take us long to figure out how to recreate it. Just crash into the side of the starting line pole with a decent amount of speed, and that's a lap triggered. It's the easiest lap skip to perform by a landslide.
[Snow Hope Village Skip] [Discovered by: Hamm Mann] [Difficulty: Medium] [Time save: 3 - 15 seconds] This works totally differently from the other lap skips in the game, as it doesn't make use of the game's lap detection system, but instead the track collision system. The way you perform this glitch is by taking the halfpipe path for the track, and then boosting up the left side of it over the fence. if you do this the game thinks you are further back than you actually are and you run into an invisible wall that's only meant to be there if a mistake is made with this. however if you boost at just the right angle (try to aim yourself towards the green tree to the right of the starting line) you can just barely trigger a lap. now the time save isn't from triggering the lap, but it's from when the game flings you back to where you should have been. now it's highly recommended you use a flight ability after doing so, because if you don't you will be flying for drastically longer and lose a lot of the gained time save.
[Tombstone Pass Skip] [Discovered by: Rainy Day] [Difficulty: Easy - Brutal] [Time save: Potentially 100 seconds] Ah yes, the most ancient lap skip in this game's history. yet despite us knowing about this since it's speedrunning infancy, we still don't know HOW to do it consistently! How it works is by abusing the game's faulty lap detection system, as the way the game checks if you actually did a lap is with an invisible box in front of the starting line. if the starting line is hit while inside this box, a lap is deducted. if the starting line is hit outside of this box, a lap is counted. the way the Tombstone Pass skip works is by clipping between a water bucket at the game's starting line to get past the game's lap counter, and because of this it's pretty much luck if the game decides to let you past.
[Alone In The Park Skip] [Discovered by: Malek (Spaztic_Gaming) ] [Difficulty: Hard] [Time save: Potentially 100 seconds] Well done to malek for discovering this after only being in the speedrunning community for two days. anyways, this is pretty much a harder but more consistent version of the tombstone pass skip where you use a dumpster to clip into the walls and then exit outside of the invisible wall. it's a tad bit finnicky, but it's childs play... for when the real fun begins...
[The Retro Tech] [Discovered by: Arossavi] [Difficulty: Good fucking luck] [Time save: Potentially 140 seconds] I am shocked that we even found this in the first place considering how... well, fucking brutal it is. it involves using a sign near the end of the track to proxy over a set of crates, using them to clip you out of bounds, boosting enough to trigger the lap and then bouncing off invisible walls without clipping back in bounds to trigger it over and over and beat one of the longest tracks in the game at the speed it takes to do a boss race. holy shit, it's gonna be a while before this becomes consistent. or at least, until Arossavi lets out his secret.
[UPDATE] Arossavi made a tutorial video on how to consistently pull off the Retro Tech, and it provided us with the missing piece of the puzzle for the hardest parts of the trick. Give it a watch if you haven't already.
