It might appear not much has changed, but in fact there is quite a bit. 
Inspired by road fighter, I've added a bend.  This bend is a little bigger than I would have liked, but I'm at the mercy of the track pieces that come with the kit, so I had to make due with what I have.  With this size of bend, it looked HORRIBLE going over it without any rotation.  So I used a series of checkpoint-like colliders placed at intervals around the bend.  When the player hits these rotation checkpoints, it rotates to match the checkpoint - so that's how the rotation is accomplished right now.  I actually had some smoothing in to help with the jittery-ness, but I ended up taking that out and embracing the retro roughness of the harsh rotation — it kinda grows on ya, and besides the final version might not have this big of a bend. 

Pictured: Editing the checkpoints

Pictured: The final result on the car!

It's not perfect, but it's retro-rough, so I might be able to get away with it!!

Optimizations:

• I did a bunch. This game should run like shit off a shiny shovel on any potato-PC when I'm done.  I removed the expensive mesh colliders on the track pieces and hand-made equivalent box colliders and marked all the pieces as static so unity can optimize the heck out of the track.
• I revamped the car controller and got ridda the physics to opt for directly moving the transform or position of the car, and optimized my formulas quite a bit.  The controller has never been better and it's a nice ~2% faster, so I'll take it.
• I tweaked and twiddled some graphics settings, and lowered and removed a bunch of stuff - like the skybox for example, I can, ofc remove as we never look at the sky.   ...so a bunch of common sense changes like that to make things run smoother.

Refinements:

I spent some time on the lateral movement. It occured to me that it's not logical to be able to move the car when you're not moving, so I rolled with that theory a little, and made a resistance curve so that you gain more control as you gain speed.  I'm not sure I'm done tweaking it yet, but it's starting to feel pretty good, I think I might like it!  

The AI, who didn't make the cut in this version cause I messed him up just before I made the build, is now able to look ahead and therefore able to (sorta) navigate the new bends in the road.  And he's able to reset (sorta!) if he gets messed up.   There's not much left to do, and the AI will be smart enough to go, then things will start to come together pretty fast, I think!

Others:

• You can quit the game with Esc key now! 
• There's a FPS counter and a whole buncha other metrics on screen now - so we can keep an eye on that framerate.  While performance, it's not fully optimized yet, so there could be issues still.  Oh, and the FPS is capped at 60 and VSync is enabled by default now (I think!  ...pretty sure I did ..!)  OFC, ideally we'll provide a settings menu to let the player decide these kind of settings, but to me these are pretty good settings for prototyping. 

Pictured: The FPS counter and a whole lot more!  There's a whole other panel that I didn't capture, but there's lots of info displayed!

Where to next?

I gotta fix the AI, then build a stretch of road that's long enough to actually play.  Once done, I think I have some work to do to make the car feel faster, I don't think it's quite fast enough, and I might look into a few effects to help enhance the feeling of speed.

Then I'm gonna flesh-out our spawn system and start spawning AI's and that should give us our first actual play test - with some actual gameplay to test the controls on.   I'm planning to support 2 difficulty levels, so the spawner will ofc spawn more on the higher difficulty level, and I'll likely tweak a few of the AI's parameters on the higher difficulty too. These parameters are actually already built in and seem to be working pretty good, so this feature should go quickly and smoothly now - as it's been planned for since the beginning!

That's it for this release!  Next release, the rubber hits the road! We can start perfecting the controls and gameplay!

🏎️💨