Roller Beetle Racing

I'm new to roller beetle racing and so far my best time has only been 459,390 so I have a few questions.

*Does rolling side to side (a and d) effect the speed at all?

*Is staying on the path faster then staying on the grass?

*Do skills stack together?

*How did ram work before it got "fixed"?

It increases your path of travel, so it effectively increases how long it takes for you to get from point A to point B. It doesn't slow you down.

Not sure what you mean there. The only terrain things that I can think of that relate to speed are hills and water.

If you use Dash twice, they will take you up ~25% speed each time, separately, so I guess they stack.

If you use Dash and then Ram, you will have a ~25% increase of speed, and then ~100% speed for 3 seconds. When Ram ends, you go back to your original speed.

If you use Ram and then Dash, you will go to ~100% speed, making Dash useless. After 3 seconds, you go back to your original speed.

To first understand how that worked, you have to understand how Ram currently works. When you use Ram, you go to ~100% speed. When it ends 3 seconds later, you're back down to whatever speed you used when you activated Ram.

Before the nerf, the trick was to use Ram once, and then before it ended, use Ram again. The second usage of Ram would register your current speed as ~100%, which meant that when the second usage of Ram was finished, your speed would drop down to ~100%, which was effectively no drop at all.

The idea for using that trick was to save Rams until you could get through checkpoints and use the second one, or to copy it with an Echo.

Under that strategy, not taking any water routes, not through the help of any boxes, and with no knockdowns, one could consistently get times over 460k.

So if you use dash and then ram afterwards it'll go back to your dash speed you were at before the ram? Or all the way back to just normal speed nomatter what?

Again, I explain. The way Ram works is that it sets your speed to maximum for three seconds, and then drops you all the way down to where you where when you activated Ram.

Therefore, you should activate Dash before Ram and wait until you gain the full ~25% benefit of Dash to use Ram. When Ram ends, you'll go back to the speed you were at when you activated the skill. I personally try to let Dash end, wait a second or two, and before my speed can start dropping fast back to normal, I'll use Ram to keep it around ~70%-~100%.

If you activate Ram and then Dash, you're killing yourself in two ways:
1. You're already at max speed, so Dash doesn't get you any extra speed.
2. Your speed will drop to where it was before you activated Ram with no extra speed tacked on.

The only case I know of besides water and Supers where speed boosts actually slow down in mid-use is the spiral on the last stretch. I've always experienced a slow down in my speed, no matter how many speed boosts I'd use.