Wild! The tone of this game reminds me of movies like Mad God or Junk Head, which is great. I love especially the screens and how they react to the light.
Maybe the jarring effect of the total stop is pronounced, because at least to me, scraping the car's front corner to a wall in a shallow angle is by far the most common way to hit a wall (for example when understeering in a corner) and it also happens to be something you mentioned you're still working on.
At least to me, the expected result of scraping the front corner in a shallow angle would be that the car would bounce back with reduced speed, allowing me to keep accelerating and start thinking about the next corner. I would shrug it off and think, "oh well, that's going to make my time a bit worse, but I can't wallow in it, since the next corner is already coming up". I would still be engaged with the action. Now if the car even slightly brushes a wall, the flow stops, and my attention shifts from the fun stuff to my mistake, and I have to slowly get the car going again.
But these were just my thoughts on the importance of the "flow". The important thing is that you get it to a point where YOU'RE happy with it. Hope this was of some help anyway :P
You left such thoughtful feedback, so I'll try to return the favor: the drifting feels nice, and the particle effects give flavor to the driving. Handling-wise my favourite car was the one that drifted automatically, it had a good balance of speed and turning. It's great that there are so many different cars with different properties.
Nice minimalist artstyle. The grass tiles are a good midtone between the two main colors, and this added variation makes the tracks with grass more pleasing to look at than the ones without. If you feel like the tracks need more visual variation, I think that midtone is the way to go.
My main criticism was going to be how the black walls destroy all momentum, but I can see from your devlog that this is very intentional. If the black wall basically means reload the map (since reversing kills your time anyway), you could go all in on the masochism and just kill the player if they hit the wall: explosion -> instant restart -> try again. Maybe changes the nature of the game a bit too much though :D
Haha thanks again for the comment. Sorry for your eyes, the driving idea for the visuals was that I wanted everything to be wobbling all the time, and it surely isn't to everyone's (or anyone's?) taste, but it just had to be done :D! I'll keep your offer in mind, if I'm looking for collaboration (warning: I work pretty slow :P).
Thanks for playing and thanks for the feedback! I made the turning super aggressive to give the player the ability to react to turns really quickly, but the downside is that it's pretty hard to fine tune the direction you're facing, even if you tap really lightly :D.
Thanks for finding the volume slider bug, I'll try to fix that.
