Apparently I woke up today and thought, "I want to write an essay"
This game is super good, the car feels amazing to drive, and the main mechanic is unique, interesting and fun. I think it has great potential to stand out.
The game currently lacks a lot of qol features (understandably). The main annoying one that I've noticed is that you cant restart after the race has ended, meaning that for every race you do you have to go through the tutorial. It also lacks many menus (main menu, pause, etc) that could definitely make the game feel more polished though the UI that is there feels very clean.
The tutorial is ok, it teaches you the main mechanic which is the most important thing, though I find the text telling you to essentially press shift a bit long winded. I also noticed that naturally when going for a perfect bounce, I release earlier than intended and found it confusing the slow down around the window, as it seems to just make me wait an extra second to be able to get the bounce and meant I was unable to actually get a grasp of the timing for it outside of the race.
I generally didn't notice when i got a perfect bounce, so some vfx may go a long way in indicating that, you could also increase the reward for it - my current understanding is that you get a bit more boost than you would otherwise (which didn't effect me much as often I already had near full boost). My ideas would be to have an extra speed boost and/or a boost overflow (boost that goes outside of the current range and dissipate overtime which encourages more immediate usage of the boost).
The races are fun, racers are interesting to interact with (especially with the rear view camera ;) ). I do think there is room for more decision making during the race but that likely comes from the fact that the only other racing game I've really played being Mariokart. I don't really have much else to add - in other words: you nailed it.
You have really decrease the ease/fun of breaking your game over this jam, whether thats a good thing I'll leave to you. There are still a few theoretical way for me to get a glitched time, but all seem to require high levels of precision that would take me a millennium to gain. You can drive into the wall to flip your car and due to the insane downforce, use it to A: fling right to the finish or B: gain loads of speed. You do have control in the state, but its very finicky and hard to practice (especially since there's no restart). Currently you can hold shift forever, which allows for the old drive backwards method in a scuffed way, but I assume thats unintentional.
It would be interesting to see other modes such as time trials and maybe online races, as well as new tracks to add some variation to the gameplay. Aesthetically its nice but its quite generic and I can easily see it feeling very samey. The music could also fit the mood better, maybe taking a page from mk and speeding up the tempo on the final lap?
I've loved this game since my old pb of 7.80 and am excited to see where you take it.