Given all the issues that were there when the engine was released (bugs/incomplete documentation) I decided to do the minimum of work. I made a hacky engine with which I look 3 moves ahead and choose the best option. I don’t consider the opponent, oil powerups, or score at all. Only allowed actions are left, right, accelerate, boost. I don’t even consider collisions with the opponent. Whenever a rule was unclear of difficult to implement I went for a simpler implementation.
I’m sharing these details in the hope that the next round will make such a simple approach useless.
What I would change is to drop oil when not turning and max speed.