The tutorial completely mislabels and gives outright misinformation about how nitro works. Here's how Nitro actually works.

Nitro influences your car in four ways. Acceleration rate, the top speed of your car, its toughness and its "grip factor". Not its handling. That's a different thing.

Top speed with Nitro on is identical for all types. Nitro types only influence your acceleration rate and your grip factor. Your priority should be to boost as much and as long as possible except in certain situations we'll explain below.


Use this whenever you're not cornering. A car with a good nitro stat should be able to basically boost in Yellow at all times as long as you're drifting in every corner you can drift, near-miss every traffic car, and take every jump close to optimally.

Do not use it right out of corners until you have finished angling yourself properly, you'll lose a bunch of nitro for no real effect. You can only boost immediately out of a corner if you have very high (80+) Handling, and even then you need to be careful about it.

In short, Yellow has
• Drain rate 1
• Accel +
• Grip -


Perfect Nitro's use is mostly to exit or navigate difficult corners and cross slowdown terrain. If you're not doing either, you don't need to be hitting Perfects. The keyword for Perfects is anticipation. By default you will waste 3-5% of your bar at minimum just to turn it on, so be well aware of what is coming up so you trigger it on time.

Perfect Nitro offers no other speed benefits outside of preventing slowdowns that would impact other nitro types, and for cheaper than Shockwave does. Perfect is for preserving speed, not gaining it, unless you're exiting a corner.

In short, Blue has
• Drain rate 2
• Accel +
• Grip +


The tutorial says nothing about this one which is kind of ridiculous when it's probably one of the most important types. Afterburner is all about accelerations, so use it in straightaways and jumps. Using it to recover from a corner as you're still angling will not only lead to you wasting a bunch of Nitro, it will also make you corner worse and lose speed on top of that.

If you're hitting any air for more than a split second, you need to be hitting Afterburner the moment your wheels take off. As your air time is limited, getting the most accel so you can approach your airborne max speed is paramount.

In short, Red has
• Drain rate 3
• Accel ++
• Grip --


Shockwave is depicted as being the "fastest"... Which is not only completely incorrect, it's also misleading. Shockwave has a very specific effect, outside of being a combination of Red and Blue, that makes it useful: It's the only type that increases your car's toughness, allowing it to survive collisions with other vehicles and objects from the side more reliably.

Be mindful that angle is incredibly important. If your front bumper touches a wall during shockwave you're probably more likely to wreck than you are using yellow. Shockwave should be used strategically in full-contact races so that you can survive someone attempting to crash you off the track. Otherwise you're wasting nitro outside of using a more appropriate type.

The notable exception is exiting very nasty corners, such as very tight hairpins with lots of rough terrain. However, if you need shockwave for that, you're compensating for handling that's too low for this track.

In short, Purple has
• Drain rate 4
• Accel ++
• Grip +
• Toughness +

Getting airtime and using it efficiently is one of the main ways of getting a ton of speed and catching up/staying ahead. However, poorly approached air is also the best way to completely eat crap and ruin your entire run.

Your airborne top speed is significantly higher than your grounded top speed. You want to spend as much time as possible going fast. So you want to get airtime that is both long AND has a good trajectory that doesn't send you on a ridiculous parabola that wastes your time.


Ramps have more or less 4 types of elevation:
• Bump (short hops, like in Singapore)
• Low (about the height of your car)
• Steep (more than the height of your car)
• Supersteep (about twice or more the height of your car)

Generally, the height of a ramp correlates with the airtime you'll get out of it. Bump ramps are generally obligatory to cross anyway.

Ramps can be flat or slanted, in which case they are barrel roll ramps. You take flat ramps by spinning on them. You take barrel roll ramps by driving into them. From the side that is the lowest first, of course. Otherwise it's a wall.

There is one ideal way of approaching a ramp: Head on and slightly offset to the side of the road that has the most space, especially if it's a flat ramp.

This is especially true if the ramp has obstacles directly against it, as trying to spin on it might just cause you more trouble than it's worth. This is also especially true if you're hitting a supersteep barrel roll ramp, as those can send you further up that they do forwards, and that's a huge time loss.


Pay attention to where you're going as to not land, even partially, on an obstacle such as a fence, that either instantly explodes you or bounces you off at a weird angle that'll either kill or stall you.

When you take a barrel roll ramp, the number of rolls you'll get if taken properly is based on how far and high you're expected to go, assuming your angle does not change midflight. This means that if you turn during a barrel roll jump, you may land on an elevation that is too high for your roll to complete.

In VERY specific cases, you can 360 before landing to slightly angle yourself better, but this is hugely unreliable.


Airtime gives a trivial amount of nitro, with only 80+ Nitro stat letting you keep up with Yellow as you jump. Try your best to take all jumps while spinning or barrel-rolling. You must initiate the spin before you hit the ramp because you can't drift in midair. Usually. Sometimes you can, it's weird.

The only exceptions are if
• Short flat ramp

OR (all below at once)
• You are about to take a flat ramp at full speed
• Have high nitro
• Are in a competitive position against someone nearby.

A 360 has a small speed loss, and if you have nitro to spare, taking it straight on is a speed advantage.


When hitting a ramp, use your afterburner/red. You want as much acceleration as possible so you can reach that airborne top speed, or at least get close to it. Try to have a bit of nitro to initiate a ramp, otherwise your nitro will stall for a moment and you're losing potential speed.

If your nitro stat is low, first of all, don't drive a car that has a low Nitro stat, second, wait for whichever Nitro gain type you're going for (roll or spin) to give you one tick of nitro gain, THEN use your afterburner.


Some ramps are absolute bastards and consistently lead you into some weird nonsense that makes you crash if you don't know exactly what you're doing. Notorious examples are:

• Almost any bump/low barrel roll ramp, especially those on Singapore and Vienna, which will lead to a half-roll unless taken PERFECTLY, leading to a crash.

• The ramps leading to the suspension bridge on Midwest, which has a massive, invisible deathplane above the suspension cables.

• Some supersteep ramps on Himalayas that are so steep that they make you lose lots of speed from the parabola's trajectory (this is why you take them offset)

• The ramp from the dam in Arizona that leads to the hairpin corner with the semi truck on the inside. If you 360 too late, you WILL hit the wall at a bad angle and stall.

• Generally flat ramps that lead straight into harsh corners, where it's likely that your spin will end against a wall and make you stall.

• Absolutely everything in Greenland that has a stage hazard (volcano, airplane) nearby.


SPIN. You can't barrel roll and spin, if you 360 before you take the bad ramp, you may get a weird angle, but you'll land on your wheels at the very least.

Don't 360 if you feel your spin will land you at a bad angle. This is what I call a stall and it's worse than most crashes. Know your ramps. Pay very close attention to which ones are hard and think of how you can approach them best.

Most cars in this game are awful. Almost every car in the game starts awful. There are very few exceptions. Most cars won't be competitive at all if they're not fully upgraded (not necessarily maxed out, but that helps a lot).

The early game will teach you that muscle sucks and electric is god. This is also wrong. There are godawful cars for both types. In the end this is what you REALLY need to pay attention to:


It means nothing. It's a meme. Ignore it.


Remember that your max speed is going to be around 3% less than your Nitro top speed, and significantly less than your airborne. Top speed is absolutely important, but it's useless to "be able" to go fast if you can't, well.

Go and stay fast. Top speed should be a baseline - everything else matters more since it's what actually lets you access and use that top speed.


You need some level of accel to not drive a barge. Luckily most cars don't suck at accel, and good Nitro makes up for it. Upgrade it decently but max it out last.


Handling is a vital stat and you'll soon learn to hate any car that is under 65 handling. Ideally you'd like to have 70+. You cannot go wrong with more Handling. Very high Handling is stupendously useful.

The higher your handling is, the wider your three angles:
• The angle in which you can still accelerate at all.
• The angle in which you can stall your speed.
• The angle at which you're not considered to be "braking".

There are handling thresholds of sorts that will let you take certain corners cleanly without having to drift. At high handling you'll just avoid losing so much speed, it's as if you got a massive accel upgrade. You should get your handling as high as possible, and low-handling cars are absolutely not appropriate for very technical tracks such as New Zealand, Arizona, Carribean, etc.

You'll notice that most superfast cars tend to have an awful handling stat, and you'll barely ever touch or keep your max speed as a result. This is why cars like the Lotus Elise are really good, because you'll be at your top speed 95% of the time, and sometimes that 292 KPH constantly is better than a car that can sometimes hit 360.


If it's sub 70 it's bad. Doesn't mean the car is unusable, just that your Nitro will be very limited in utility.

Anyway, under 70 you'll have to do something called "being strategic about your nitro use", whereas over 75 you can just basically blast yellow at all times when you're not cornering on most tracks. Not only that, but higher Nitro stat means slightly better acceleration (never speed) from your Nitro, so you can accept having slightly worse accel if your Nitro stat is huge.

Most superfast S tier cars also have ridiculously bad Nitro. If you ever drove a Bugatti Bolide for the Clash, for instance, you'll realize that the car is entirely driving-skill-based, nitro is barely even a thing at all for these cars.


You'll notice that cars regularly considered to be Really Good have some utterly deranged stat spreads for everything but often mid to ok top speed. Once you've driven a maxed out DS E-Tense you'll quickly understand that a car that is almost constantly at top nitro speed at all times is significantly better than a car that can go 40 KPH faster... Under ideal conditions.

Some cars look like they have stupid low power ratings, like the 370Z Nismo that caps under 1600, but it has 80+ on every non-speed stat, so it's actually really nice to drive! Look for cars like that. The Lotus Elise, the Viper ACR and Corvette Grand Sport are all excellent contenders for their class and you'll be able to get them semi reliably under Garage Level 15.

There are some things the game doesn't communicate to you at all. You just kind of have to figure it out via trial and observation.


Sometimes you'll just lose a bunch of speed. This is because tracks have areas I'll call "rough terrain", which reduce your max speed considerably. Some make perfect sense (like the snow-covered trackside in Himalayas, or the sidewalks in Paris.)

Some don't and are absolutely imbecilic:
• The dusty patches in the roads close to the tunnels in Rome.
• That single patch of red asphalt in the hangar in San Francisco
• The slanted roads below the minecart tracks in Midwest, but NOT the halfpipe corner in Auckland

There are probably others. You'll notice it pretty quickly. You can ignore most of the speed loss areas by increasing your grip, which is what the "handling" of Perfect and Shockwave Nitro really is.


Hold down the button. If you just tap you'll get the shortest duration. You accumulate boost duration by doing stunts and collecting bottles while NOT boosting, but it's not displayed at all, and the cap is very minimal. Your boost is extended if you are far away from other Syndicate players. Cop Nitro is substantially stronger on the accel but also very short, though you can have it last a truly obscene amount of time if you can manage your speed and not overuse it.


When you play multi, make sure you check the ruleset. Some races are fullcontact and allow you to smash people. Some have full contact but ultra-high durability cars. Some races have slipstream at all times. Some only when someone uses nitro. None of this is displayed on the pre-race camera panning (only the slipstream logo is), but it is written in the season description.


Most will tell you that's a jerk move. Even if it wasn't, it's almost always a time loss unless it's perfectly executed (and anyone can smash into you as you finish it and obliterate you, which they will, you bastard).