Hey all,

I've just competed another WR for the Baja 1000 run, so I figured I'd upload a few thoughts here to give an update to anybody poking their head in from time to time. Most gonna talk about optimal strategies and room for improvement (there are very few runners for this game so LOTS of room for improvement to say the least). If you haven't joined the discord yet, please consider it. I'm mostly in there rambling but theres some fun to be had, I think.

Class 1 - I have a new theory that the Class 1 vehicles might be a better option than the Trophy Truck vehicles for a lot of the tracks. While the Trucks do have the engine power advantage, they are also one of the most unstable, hard to control classes in the game, making any sort of consistency hard to pull off. You'll be cruising just fine on straightaways, easily outpacing anything else, but the minute you come to a bumpy turn the fun times are over and lots of momentum is lost. This is where Class 1 excels. Class 1 vehicles are a bit slower than the trucks but they easily make up for it with the ability to stay on all four wheels during those moments the Trophy truck feels useless. I call all of this the Class 1 theory, because I'm still not entirely sure that the best Class 1 player could beat the best Trophy player, but do notice that the WR I just set was with Class 1 and beat out every record prior that was set by a Trophy Truck. The Desert Doc is the Class 1 car I specifically put the most praise towards. The wheels are far apart and the suspension seems to do a good job at keeping the bottom of the car from sending the player off of random bumps.

Cutting - I think the biggest optimization that could be made right now is learning what turns you can cut and which turns you cant. There are so many time saving instances where you can basically skip full sections of the track by jumping in and out of bounds. The problem is that the game has some pretty random, inconsistent decision making behind the logic for determining cuts, so the playerbase would be best off by going through each turn one by one and determining if it can be skipped or will have to be fully passed through. If you watch my Baja 1000 run, you'll see tons of instances of me skipping a bunch of the track and tons of instances where the game teleports me backwards for skipping the tiniest little section imaginable.

Campaign Upgrades - Another thing that literally anybody trying to get the WR for the Baja 1000 could do is play through the campaign in order to get upgrades for you car. If you do so, you can transfer the car over to the time trials mode and have a significant advantage over the vanilla cast. I'm too lazy and unmotivated to play through that slog of a campaign right now, but if somebody wants to get a free speed boost, this is an option. Apparently there is a cheatcode that does this for you but I haven't been able to make it work for my setup soooooo IDK.

Manual Gearbox and Clutch Boosting - The most essential tech for this game that determines if you'll be going fast or not is whether or not you understand how to clutch boost while using the manual gearbox. It would take many paragraphs to properly describe how it all works, but to keep it simple, you can trick the game into thinking your car is at full power in third gear while going around turns you'd normally have to approach and exit in second gear. Essentially what you want to be doing is coming at a turn in fourth, dropping into third gear just as your starting to turn, tapping the clutch button once every second until you've exited the turn, then going back to fourth. The setup changes if you are going up hill or going into another turn, where you will want to stay in third instead of going to fourth. By tapping the clutch button you trick the game into forcing your RPMs upwards instead of rapidly dropping like they normally would if you were to go into a turn in third gear. What happens in game is that you'll be in a turn at 30 mph then come out of it at 80 mph without having to do much besides hold the gas down.

Thats all I have for now. I'll add more comments if anything comes to mind.