A big thank you to @justin3055 for his help with both executing the new ultra strat and heavily optimizing it! This flap wouldn't have been possible without him.
Alternate video with KCL view and extra information displayed: th-cam.com/video/cbcUl-U9ofc/w-d-xo.html
(thanks again to @EPIK95 for providing these track edits!)
A couple weeks ago, I gained back some of my motivation to work on this game and decided to take a look at this track, and came up with various loose ideas for a respawnless ultra shortcut involving supersliding to gain large amounts of external velocity. Since I had no clear idea of what I wanted to do yet, I just decided to perform Charlie's delayed lap count (modified slightly to account for Wario Bike's stupid hitbox) to save for later. While Wario Bike is possibly not the optimal vehicle for this particular strat, its high handling (rivaled only by Bit Bike and Sugarscoot) and low drift at least make it pretty close.
While I was working on exiting the pipe, I decided to mess around with the EV stacking properties of the upside-down reject road, and through trial and error gradually figured out how to gain more EV, more efficiently, with less unwanted movement. With these new (?) methods, I managed to stack nearly 2000 EV, enough to send me flying for miles even after going up through the pipe.
This gave me a different idea. I wanted to see if I could redirect the EV gained underwater in such a way that I could go all the way over the wall to the left of the finish line and achieve a respawnless, faster ultra. Through more trial and error I figured out a general method to retain a large amount of EV and turn sharply towards the finish line, and while I got somewhat close, I didn't really get anything all that promising.
I decided to hand the ghost off to Justin, who had already helped me with the one shroom clip into the pipe, and through great suffering and commitment (he did it in a couple hours), he confirmed the ultra, and we achieved a first flap time of ~8.1 seconds. After further refinement, he was later able to retain so much EV with better technique that he saved about 1.5 seconds through air movement alone, and we (mostly him) worked to grind it down to the ~6.4 that the flap sits at now. I can't overstate just how much Justin helped with this discovery, he is so cool and awesome
TAS BKT Cut: 2.411
Former BKT by Charlie and Ejay: th-cam.com/video/utgwm011xqs/w-d-xo.html
♪ Donkey Kong Country: Tropical Freeze - Alpine Incline (Ground) ♪
th-cam.com/video/_LUaw0mUOPs/w-d-xo.html