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You are not actually racing live players. You are racing a recording of them playing... well you are not actually even doing that. You simply have a set period of time to complete the race to win it.
How you see someone doing in the race is actually meaningless outside of trying to get you to hurry up and use gold for boosters.
You have at minimum 24 hours to complete a race to win. It can go as high as 48-72 hours based on other players experiences. No one is exactly sure how much time you have but myself and others have never lost if we are around the 24 hour mark when we finish the race. I would imagine it is realistically a minimum of 36 hours to maybe a random max of x hours.
Basically do not worry about other players, it is simply a timed event and you are the only one actually competing in it.
Hello @beth01011954 as @Pyrolight pointed out in their post the Episode race is not a real time event. You don't have to feel cheated though, because this is clearly stated by King. If you click on the "i" symbol of the event this pop up tells you that you are racing against recordings of other players. I am surprised you got this far in the game without ever realising this. If the first player is not already past the post on the event screen when you log in then you can definitely always win every episode race if you then play without pause until the last level is completed. Your race isn't lost, so keep going and you can win it. Good luck!