How to speed flip, and how to train it

A speed flip is a diagonal flip that you cancel immediately, so your car keeps its forward speed instead of losing it to the flip's backward rotation — and it's the reason some cars reach the ball on kickoff visibly before others. The whole thing takes about three inputs, executed close enough together that they read as one motion once you've got it.

The sequence

1. Angle the flip, don't aim it straight. Push the stick (or hold a direction key with W) up and slightly to one side — roughly 20 to 45 degrees off straight forward, left or right depending on which way you want to go — then jump twice in quick succession to trigger the flip.
2. Cancel it immediately. As soon as the flip starts, pull the stick straight back down, toward the 6 o'clock position (on keyboard: the opposite direction key plus the brake/back input). This is the step that actually makes it a speed flip: it cuts the animation short before your car tilts backward, which is the part of a normal flip that bleeds off your speed.
3. Small air roll toward the same side you flipped, to land flat. Hold the air roll button that matches your flip's direction — not the opposite side — for a brief moment while you're still holding the stick back. This levels the car out so it lands on all four wheels instead of on its side or nose.

Hold boost through all three steps. Because the cancel keeps your nose pointed forward the whole time, you're not wasting any of that boost on an animation facing the wrong way, which is the entire point of doing this over a plain flip.

Why it actually saves time

A regular front flip rotates your car forward, then briefly backward as the animation finishes — and if you're holding boost during that backward half, you're pushing yourself in the wrong direction for a moment. The cancel in step two removes that backward phase entirely, so every bit of boost you hold goes toward speed you keep. That's the entire mechanical reason a speed flip beats a normal flip or a plain boost-forward on kickoff: not a bigger flip, a shorter one.

The mistake almost everyone makes first

Pausing between the diagonal flip and the cancel. If there's a gap — even a small one — between pressing the second jump and pulling the stick back, the flip has time to rotate further than you want, and you land with your nose pointed up instead of flat. The fix isn't doing the cancel harder, it's doing it sooner: the two inputs should feel like they're stacked on top of each other, not sequential. The second most common error is air-rolling to the wrong side or holding it too long, which rolls you onto the side of the car instead of the wheels.

How to actually train it

Trial and error in a real match teaches you almost nothing here, because a whiffed speed flip during a kickoff costs you the kickoff and you move on without ever isolating what went wrong. The standard fix is a custom training pack built specifically to repeat the kickoff over and over from a dead stop, so you can fail the same rep immediately and try again without waiting for a match to reset.

One that's specifically built around this — the Speedflip Kickoff Test pack, code A503-264C-A7EB-D282 — drops you straight into repeated kickoff attempts so you can drill the diagonal-flip-into-cancel motion in isolation rather than mixed in with everything else a kickoff involves. Load it from Training → Custom Training using the code, and work one direction (say, flipping left) until it's consistent before switching to the other side — the two hands don't learn together, and most players are noticeably worse on their off-side flip if they never trained it separately.

Once you're landing it consistently in the training pack, the next test is doing it in an actual kickoff without thinking about the three steps individually — if you're still consciously sequencing "diagonal, cancel, roll" mid-kickoff, it isn't trained yet, it's just slow.

Getting the camera and controller settings right — particularly a controller deadzone low enough that a 20-degree stick angle actually registers as 20 degrees — makes this whole sequence noticeably easier to land consistently, so it's worth sorting out before you blame the technique.