That makes Highspeed Etoile’s writing all the more puzzling, because there's barely any real characters, it's staggering how they decided on such a seasonal format for their competition, and yet don't make any meaningful effort to show or develop any of the actual drivers, think about all the crazy rivalries in motorsports, and they have free reign to do anything they want, yet they chose to do basically nothing? The only real standouts are "King" and "Queen" in front of the pack, however there’s nothing beyond that, nothing about what makes them tick, their motivation, their thoughts, their personalities, well anything really, they're just generic good driver #1 and good driver #2.
This anime is clearly heavily inspired by F1 but instead of making some legally distinct car designs and calling it a day, they went all the way throwing in a bunch of gimmicks which were to its own detriment. The setting is futuristic so we have these spaceship looking monstrosities for cars, AI companions instead of race engineers on the radio which could've made for some banter or commentary on the races, pitting is seemingly automated, and oddly, self-driving cars to pad out the grid, which to be fair aren’t even that different from a lot of the human ones, since neither get any characterization whatsoever.
Worst of all is their DRS substitute, while it isn’t perfect in F1, you could at the very least make compelling arguments about it, the driver behind is able to get some increased speed to seal the deal on an overtake if they were close enough. This anime chooses to just give a crazy super boost to everyone, which renders the other racing bits kind of obsolete and makes the whole strategy focused around them. It’s definitely more flashy, that’s for sure, but more insidious than that, it’s also a tool for the writers to pull anyone they want to the front of the pack for that sweet sweet drama.
And then there’s the main character, which is terribly executed on a lot of fronts. It feels like they wanted a fish out of water type of situation, where it’s someone new getting into the sport and finding out all about the rules, how it works and all that, however the issue is she’s just thrown into the highest and most prestigious level of the sport anyways. She apparently had some training too which makes things even worse when she’s not aware of even the most basic rules of the sport she’s supposed to be competing in, like what a yellow or blue flag is, or that pitting is a thing. It would be like if there was a chess anime and the MC gets into a tourney with the likes of Magnus Carlson and Hikaru Nakamura and in their first match they say something like "uhm, what does the horsey do?" it's that stupid.
To cap things off there's also the generally terrible flow to the racing in each episode, there's no rhyme or reason to things, they show some parts, skip over a bunch of laps, show some other random parts and so on and so forth, this is miserable for the audience because they might as well be watching some random footage of different races, there's no sense of where each driver is, what's the distance between each of them, what they want to accomplish and stuff like that, this also doubles as a "good" thing for the writers since they can just lazily place whatever driver in whatever random place they want for those dramatic scenes. One time they mention there's a 6s gap, is that little or is that a lot? The audience has no frame of reference for these spaceship cars, and it's not like that was followed through anyways, it was quickly forgotten and things returned more or less to what they were with the King and Queen racing almost side by side in the first 2 places and everybody else being irrelevant.
It’s frustrating because that isn’t even necessarily a bad thing, if King and Queen had any personality to speak of their rivalry could be exciting or something to write home about, similarly, F1 has dominant teams and drivers, there’s a lot of material there, maybe it’s about a scrappy team trying to get their footing into the sport, maybe it’s an engineer with a novel solution for their vehicle, maybe it’s a genius driver that’s pushing the car to the very limits, maybe it’s about the tough realities about how funding is distributed in the sport and the bureaucracy behind the scenes, just anything at all really.
The MC also spins out 2 times in her first race, ending up dead last if she weren't disqualified for forgetting the rules, and yet the crazy thing is she manages to recover really quickly and almost overtake from her second spin out, again there's no frame of reference for these things and it feels like the writers will just do whatever they want with the racers and their placements. As much as something like MF Ghost had some super human stuff, that might as well be a documentary comparing how grounded it and Highspeed Etoile are, at the very least in that anime you had a sense of time and place where the drivers were and what they were accomplishing, and no character suddenly spawned in elsewhere because the writers felt like it. Overall I can't say anything other than this is pretty terrible and not worth anybody’s time.
