This game is an arcade racing game pretending to be a kart racer is the TL;DR. I noticed is that basically this game has a hidden tachometer. This is essentially what determines how fast your gears are spinning, which then, in turn, correlates to how fast you're driving.

If you've driven a car enough to understand how RPMs and Gears correlates to speed, then you'll probably already guess what direction I'm probably going in. If not, then follow along. So when you're in first gear and you press the gas, you accelerate (duh).

As you rev up, your RPMs increases. As you keep the foot on the gas, you'll eventually hit the top speed of 1st gear. In automatic cars, you have to change gears (from 1st to 2nd and then 2nd to 3rd, so on and so forth) in order to access higher speeds.

Top speed of your gear is when your RPMs hit around the red zone (see the tachometer picture). At that point, your car cannot go any faster with the gears being used in 1st gear and need to switch to different gears to gain more speed.

When you shift UP into 2nd gear, the RPM needle on the tachometer resets and falls back down to the bottom, but now you've unlocked higher speeds. This is shifting up in a car. During the shifting of gears from 1st gear to 2nd gear, your car stops accelerating because

the mechanisms inside of your car are PHYSICALLY changing shit around to use different gears (more or less anyways). So while shifting you cannot accelerate because gears are basically disengaged while shifting gears.

"Neko you black ass nigga what the fuck does this have to do with Sonic Racing Crossworlds????" you may ask. Nigga it is LITERALLY the same shit in this fucking game because this game is an ARCADE RACER pretending to be a kart racer.

This game HAS an internal tachometer and RPM system mimicking that of Sega's arcade racers which mimic real life. If you turn off all music and voices and then go into Time Trials (Golden Temple is best for this) and simply accelerate from 0 speed, you can LITERALLY hear it.

When your machine hits desginated speeds, it will SHIFT UP and you can HEAR the engine/motor disengage as it shifts up before the revving noise picks up again.

And just like real life, all the machines have slightly different shifting results, as per the video. The difference is slight, but its there. "What does this mean Neko, you absolutely sweaty no-life having tryhard? Why can't you be normal for once?" you may ask.

What this means is that because gears disengage while shifting, your acceleration stat is devalued because you cannot leverage while shifting gears. What this also means is that certain machine types cannot leverage boosting acceleration stat for the sake of recovering from hits

Not as effectively as you'd guess because you cannot do ANYTHING to affect your shifting ability. It is a hidden attribute cant be directly influenced by anything in the game as far as I can tell I, however, do surmise that drift boost, dash panels, and boost basically skip this

Acceleration DOES matter when your'e not shifting gears. It's very clearly meaningful in that situation. Which means if you drop speed but not gears, you'll recover from that speed loss much more efficiently with higher acceleration.

What this means is that letting go on the gas and using brakes are less punishing with Acceleration and Speed types because for SOME forsaken reason, the time it takes to shift from 3rd gear to 4th gear is basically nil for those 2 types.

Handling and Ex Gear have it the worst because ON TOP OF THIS GAME HAVING GEARS FOR SHIFTING, YOU CAN ALSO ***TOP OUT*** SPECIFIC GEARS. This is also some INSANE stuff for a kart racing game imo.

"What is topping out, you blackity black black person?" you may ask? Topping out in car language is the act of maxing out your RPMs on a specific gear. You can tell your topped out on your current gear in Crossworlds when your speed flickers up and down by 1 speed value!

Why does matter in the context of Crossworlds? Well for 3rd gear on all machines, the cars will top out for around a dozen frames and some change before shifting up into 4th gear.

Speed and Accel top out in 3rd gear for the least amount of time while Ex Gear and Handling top out in 3rd gear for the most amount of frames. Power Tops out in both 2nd gear and 3rd gear right as it shifts and it also shifts later for some reason.

This is probably why people feel like acceleration & power types can handle getting hit the best because they overall take the least amount of time to shift back up to top speed, which in power types case, helps hide the poor acceleration.

Also probably the reason why it feels SO punishing to gear hit while using Extreme Gear (idk about handling players I don't use karts). It literally takes the most amount of time to shift gears and regain speed.

The interesting thing is that Speed has a really fast shift into 4th gear but honestly I don't know how speed types can leverage that lol.

Anyway, the topping out in 3rd gear delays how fast you can reach top speed because its directly related to how/when your machine will switch gears. Because this is a "Kart Racer", there is no manual transmission (where you can manually shift the gears yourself whenever u want)

So you kinda have to deal with how the game shifts up and down for you. You can really only get around it with some sort of external method of boosting your speed.

So to summarize, machines in this game have gears and take time to shift up to the next gear. Each machine shifts up at different speeds/rates and that impacts overall how long it takes to accelerate to top speed, regardless of your acceleration stat.

You can circumvent the need to shift with boost of any type, but I don't know if its SKIPPING the shifting or if its just SHIFTING REALLY FAST. Because all this happens in frames, the percivable impact is not as grand as all this text makes it seem.

But it adds up over the course of a race, and more importantly over the course of a time trial. On top of that, this knowledge can help you leverage how you manipulate and control your speed in a race!

Speed and Accel types can safely drop enough speed to shift down back into 3rd gear and not be really penalized for shifting back up into 4th due to fast shift times.

Hopefully this is helpful to some people, and that I haven't made a grave and fundamental misunderstanding of something because that would be embarrassing after yapping for a whole ass thread HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHHAHAHAHAHAHA (´・ω・`) anywho thanks for coming to my ted talk

@xvKOUZIvx Hopefully you don't mind being tagged. I wanted to DM you, but I can't unfortunately! If possible, and if you're interested, I'd like you to share this with Japanese players since my Japanese is not strong at all!

@xvKOUZIvx If you have any quesitons, I can answer in simple japanese before I have to use a dictionary or translator but I am willing to help spread this information with your help!questions

@GHShuffle So would this basically mean the speed you set in races (Sonic Speed, Super Sonic Speed, etc,) would actually be what the maximum gear shift is set? Like, Sonic Speed makes out at 3rd gear and Super Sonic Speed maxes at 4th, for example.

@Backstagefun1 I just tested it. Super Sonic Speed has 1 gear lol.

@GHShuffle Wait, so which one is the fastest?

@CrumpaSwine Power and Accel got to their max speed the fastest while EG was the slowest, but that's just one facet of their overall performance in races. Unless you're playing at the highest level where these types of nuances and differences mean winning and losing, its fine to play whatever

@GHShuffle I didn't know about Extreme Gear boards even having transmissions. I thought they were just planks with jet engines.

@tachyonstryker they are canonically (more or less anyways) since they don't have gears in Sonic Riders (or rather they have only 1 "gear”) so it really is just initial d devs having a wee giggle at our expense.