Traditionally speedruns have been done using Coco or N.Gin, or specifically "Acceleration" characters, and recently it's been discovered that "Fast" characters such as Dingo and Tiny are optimal for runs.

So it was unanimously decided that "Well Dingo is just faster for runs" for a while and no accurate comparison had been done. Anything from 5s, 10s or even 30s had been plucked from the sky to guess the actual timesave for using Fast over Accel so I ran some tests to look into this properly.

I tried to make it as accurate as I could, while keeping my own sanity in check. I took 7 completed attempts at each course without mistakes, then took an average of the 5 attempts, removing the fastest and slowest attempt. This isn't so much to demonstrate the absolute peak each character can achieve, but to instead look at the average course times.

Here's a summary of the average and fastest course times I recorded for all tracks you would see in a Warpless speedrun:

The comparison on the right column is looking at the time Acceleration loses compared to Fast. Over the whole run, I came to the conclusion that Acceleration loses around 27-28s compared to Fast. Now obviously this isn't an exact number, and getting a completely accurate sample of course times would take a very long time.

I condensed the data further to look at the time difference for Hubs:

Quite surprisingly, Fast saves over 9 seconds in Hub 4, which is almost all down to Hot Air Skyway and Oxide Station.

This does come with the argument of Fast characters being significantly more difficult, which I'd personally disagree with to an extent. The main problems come from Papu's Pyramids, Dragon Mines and Cortex Castle, which makes up 5 tracks in the run including bosses. These become hellish to drive using a Fast character.

However, on the flip side, Fast characters are far more consistent and easy to optimise on basic tracks, and a lot of tracks don't become more "difficult", instead just require a different approach, such as HAS and OS (imo).

So there you have it, feel free to post any questions about the data I used.

tl;dr Fast characters saves 27s in Warpless so you might as well use 'em!

If I'm not mistaken, this only takes the races themselves into consideration and not the travelling around and between hubs, right? I'm also wondering how much difference it'd make if run on PAL.

In any case, thanks for putting in the legwork.

Yeah this is just a comparison of track times. There was a side-by-side comparison of hub movement between Dingo/Coco which came out around 3s in Coco's favour, though the driving wasn't great on that so I don't want to assume that's the difference. Though even with better driving it's a small save for Acceleration chracters.

I did want to do a PAL comparison and timed the first Hub, but I was finding my PAL consistency just wasn't good so I wouldn't be confident enough to give an accurate PAL/NTSC difference at the moment.

Wow nice job, really wonderful. It looks like we can more faster only knowing "how to" drive, I have seen the wr with hypnoshark, that was creepy but I'm coco player so you mean I need to change my char.

I will try the records I have is not upload yet but know ctr99 keep in tendency is comforting. Greetings to you racers and let's try online