I'm pretty proud of this TAS. Usually when I do a TAS, there's always one or two sections where I know a lot more can be squeezed. There's always room for improvement, but I'm satisfied that almost everything in this TAS is very clean.

1:25.13 - New TAS WR by JaV
1:25.85 (+0.72) - Previous TAS WR by Joh
1:31.25 (+6.12) - RTA WR by Meh

I started this TAS with zero expectations. I knew roughly the route that I wanted to do (this was found by my GA algorithm years ago, and I'm pretty sure Nino thought about this route before that), but I didn't know exactly how to get from CP to CP. I certainly never thought that I'd be able to beat the TAS WR with it.

On my first TAS attempt, I got a 1:27.6x, which was much better than I expected, and I knew there was room for improvement. So I went back and found a better way to do the nose turn (after passing the ring where you typically respawn), which gave me a much cleaner landing, saving about 0.50s.

Then, through a combination of shear luck and bruteforce magic, I found the absolutely insane path through the next two CPs (on the first try, I instead did a much slower and "easier" bounce off the top of the arrow board). It's absolutely unbelievable that this works. Every centimetre requires perfection if you want to make the long jump through the last ring CP. It literally could not even have one kmh speed less. But this saved me an additional ~1.50s compared to my first attempt.

Then, amusingly, I was able to add insult to injury by attempting the bugslide finish that people have been theorising for the last 14 years. I actually found two ways to do it. One is grazing the wall before you land, putting you in a sharper nose down. The second is clipping the edge of the block when you land, as you see in the video. This last trick saves about 0.40s compared to driving the finish in the traditional fashion.

All TAS information, replays and inputs can be found on the official nadeo TAS spreadsheet:
https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/...

Music:
TM2 soundtrack - Air Time

Thanks,
JaV