Spurt Speed Carry-over

Speed skills increase your top speed. When the last spurt starts, if you have a speed skill active, you’ll have a slight headstart on your acceleration. It’s like you accelerated that 0.15m/s early. Even if the speed skill ends 0.1s later, since they only affect your top speed, it won’t lower your speed. This gives some extra power to speed skills that can activate at the proper time for this.

Normally, you’ll accel from, say, 20m/s to 25m/s. Starting with a skill active means you’re accelling from 20.15m/s to 25m/s. You could also think of it as, the speed skill’s duration is increased by the amount of time you spend accelerating.

Here’s a comparison of the meter gain from various types of skills, assuming the speed skills are active during the spurt and the accels last until you reach top speed.

Base: 207.46m over 9.43s White Accel: 213.50m (+6.04m) - also inherited accel unique Gold Accel: 216.62m (+9.16m) - also non-inherited accel unique White Speed: 208.84m (+1.38m) - also inherited speed unique Gold Speed: 210.63m (+3.17m) - also speed unique Dual Unique: 216.61m (+9.15m) - 211.43m (+3.97m) when inherited

Consider also that, since the speed skills only need to be active for a very short amount of time, they can also give you their speed. For example, in 2000m, a 3s skill lasts for 6s. If a gold used up 5s before the spurt, that would be 0.35 * 5 = +1.75 additional meters. It has a bit more of an effect than that due to letting you start accelerating earlier, but it’s close enough as an approximation.

This is particularly important on tracks where Final Corner accels work, such as in Scorpio Cup where Late Surger McQueen was viable due to her unique’s speed carry-over.