Air-Time

You now know how important it is to keep grip while keeping contact with the track, even losing grip just a tiny bit can lose you alot of speed and time. However, keeping contact with the track is not always possible, jumps and transitions that forces you off the ground are also quite common.

You cannot accelerate without your wheels being in contact with the track or ground. In these cases, we need to look into how you can reduce the time you are in the air. This page looks into how air-time affects your speed and different techniques to reduce it.

The speed loss of Air-Time

When we speak of “air-time” we mean the period which none of the wheels of your car is in contact with the ground. By reducing the amount of time your wheels are not touching anything, you can allow the car to accelerate more.

The following video demonstrates what air-time can do to your speed. You will see that the car which avoids the ramp, essentially avoiding air-time alltogether will have a higher acceleration than the car that drove the ramp. The result is that the car which drove the ramp has a massive time loss by the end of the track.

Air-Time Reduction

The previous video already shows a way to reduce air time. There are actually real tracks where you can simply drive on the side of the ramp. An example of this is Proyect » Revival by Chroma.

Reducing air time is for the most part finding creative ways to either avoid jumps or using existing techniques to land on the track sooner. Sometimes it is not very obvious whether you have air time or not. Many beginners don’t understand that you can actually get air time when entering and exiting a wall ride for example. We will go over this later.

But for now, let’s look at the most common way to land faster in a jump; the ride trick.

The Ride Trick

The ride trick is a technique to land sooner when jumping off an edge and in some cases, a ramp. It works by exploiting the suspension of your car in order to tilt your car to the side mid-air. By tilting your car while in the air, the wheels on one side will touch the ground sooner than if you were to just jump straight.

We will give you a demonstration with this video that shows how it works: