Ring Racers tips for new players as a new player

these tips assume you’ve completed all the ingame tutorials for 2.4

Characters

you probably already know this but as a begginer you should use characters from classes A, B, D and E, and if you feel ready you can go into classes C and G, do NOT touch class I yet
a heavy character is more prone to mess up (handling and drifting is harder), and a fast character makes the punishment for messing up worse (worse acceleration)
personally, from the starting characters i prefer amy

afaik speed characters don’t depend as much on rings and get better use on some items
on some of my tests i tried a track with multiple characters and checked the lap times, and i found out that speed characters gave me no real adventage in the final lap time
weight difference is quite noticeable in handling, even if just comparing between 1 or 2 steps
if you’re playing with a lightweight character you shouldn’t care too much about getting a big spark or overcommit to drifts

Drifting

if you fail at drifts is because you start them too late (or too early, but that’s usually never the case)
you can use a neutral, tight, or wide drift, your first instinct is probably gonna be to always go for the tight drift, but what you should do instead is combining neutral, tight and wide drifts depending on what situation you’re in, for example, on THAT section of darkville castle 2, you first initiate a wide drift and then switch to a tight one to easily overcome the turn
a neutral drift will always give you more speed than the other two

Regular brake vs E-Brake

regular braking (presing brake without pressing accel) is very fast, it’s main use is reducing horizontal speed
e-brake is slower than regular braking, it’s main use is to prevent your car from falling (moving platform, on a steep surface, etc)
if you want to reduce your speed just left go of accel without pressing brake
fast fall redirects and push you to where your character is looking

Spindash and Fast Fall

fast falling is done pressing the e-brake button combo (accel + brake) on the air,
a spindash is done by first pressing the e-brake button combo on the ground, and then the drift button, doing it on the air just triggers the fast fall
there is also a dedicated spindash button, but most of the time is gonna be easier to prepare doing the e-brake combo and waiting a bit for the right moment to start charging the spindash, instead, if you pressed the dedicated spindash button too soon it may put you on a compromising position
the only time i think the spindash button is better is when you just got rescued from a fall or got completely stalled
as for the fastfall, is gonna be easier to do the accel+brake combo since you’re already pressing the accel, instead of moving your thumb from the acccel button to the spindash button

Other

spindash charge countdown is the reverse of your ring number, so you should decide if you want to recover with a spindash or with rings
don’t use bailout to get rid of your shield, hold the item/ring button instead
ring usage should be more of a “read” than a “react”, since they have a noticeable delay between usage and activation
you can turn midair before tricking
don’t forget to use failsafe boost in the air when needed