Racing Turn Movement

I am trying to replicate the turning movement from Kirby Air Ride, seen here: Kirby Air Ride: City Trial - YouTube

You will notice just within the first few seconds of the video how responsive turning is. Most of the force is being applied in the direction specified and there isn’t much lingering in the previous direction. When I try to control movement by simply boosting the transform.forward vector and reassigning it to rigidbody.velocity, my character slides all over the place. This makes sense because the new velocity has to counteract the old one.

How do I get a better feel closer to that shown in the video?

You can up the drag. The higher the drag, the faster old velocities decay. You’ll likely have to increase the force applied.

Another solution is to map velocity to the direction of travel. Put this in fixed update

var speed = rigidbody.velocity.magnitude;
rigidbody.velocity = transform.forward * speed;

For some games where realistic physics is not the goal, the code manipulates the velocity directly rather than using AddForce().