This is probably one of, if not my personal favorite submission from this year. While I can understand some of the criticisms I think it excels at delivering an intense drifting experience, especially given the restrictions.
Is the window to get the shifts right pretty tight and unforgiving? Yes. But so is drifting a car. Getting it right is extremely satisfying and once you realize you can change gears faster by cutting it short it almost emulates discovering advanced manual driving techniques (multiple gear shifts, double clutching, etc). It also gives a sense of mastery and advancement. It feels a bit crazy that I feel this way about a game that at its core is a number memorization game but the stick and the visuals surrounding it complete the experience.
I will say the first race does take a bit too long imo or the first race should be super easy to have a better learning curve. Numbers on the screen would also be nice as I am not a manual driver. I wrote the numbers on sticky notes and put it on my screen lol. I did get a bug multiple times where I would get the "good" sound and then get the "bad" engine animation which would ultimately cut my runs short as I think the "bad" engine animation somehow wrote over my correct shifting. On thing I saw you said you might do that I would advocate against is returning the stick to the middle every time, I am assuming you were going for seamless "drift switches"(idk how to explain it") But I liked that part of the challenge was remembering where I left off. For me personally it left just enough difficulty where I wanted to keep trying to get better.
Despite those critiques, this one definitely left an an awesome impression on me. Great work!