Within the many undocumented settings in Tux Racer 1.1 (some of which deserve a different thread) is "speed mode". Such a feature is not present in the config for ETR and thus i would imagine the original.

"This is an 'undocumented' gameplay feature." If true, then the friction coefficients in the game are reduced by 20%, resulting in a substantial increase in speed."

At the moment there's nothing for or against this mode. I'm hesitant to ban it without a vote because a variable (or another category) could also be made signifying whether a run is done under this mode (side note: I'm doubtful somebody could ever try and pass off a normal run under this mode, it's very easy to detect).

I wanted to start a discussion about this. Should this be banned, or turned into its own category/variable?

I would personally suggest separate categories / variables for them. That then prevent anyone gaining an unfair advantage if they don't know about the mode, whilst also giving people the chance to run both modes separately (also those who don't know about the mode can find out about it so it alleviates any unfair advantage someone may gain).

I would always be careful about banning anything in particular when it comes to speedrun categories. Ban too many things and you risk making a game boring to speedrun.

Banning anything should only be considered in cases where something either unduly gives people an unfair advantage or has very specific requirements which would be inaccessible to the majority of speedrunners.