¶ Summary
Dirt is one of the major surfaces in Trackmania.
Becoming good at Dirt is a mastery in itself, due to it requiring knowledge of advanced skills like gear management, no-slides as well as speedslides.
The Dirt surface in general causes the car to slide at most speeds and sharp turns can cause you to lose your gear if you're not taking the optimal line.
In terms of blocks, Dirt has the second highest variety of official blocks in the game.
¶ Gameplay
As mentioned in the summary above, Dirt's slippery surface causes the car to slide at most speeds, making Gear Management crucial.
¶ No Slides
In general, at lower speeds players will want to do “no slides”, a technique that involves smooth steering at around 50-60% steering angle, which prevents your car from sliding out.
For Keyboard players, this can be achieved by toggling on Action Key 3, while on Controller or Steering Wheel players will want to move the stick/turn the wheel about halfway in the direction they want to move in.
¶ Gear Management
The Stadium Car has 5 gears with an automatic transmission, meaning your car will automatically gear up or down if the current RPM reach a certain threshold. This can be best observed with Openplanet and the Dashboard plugin.
Steering during the car gearing up causes its RPM to drop considerably, which generally slows you down and in bad cases can make you gear down again instantly. If you notice you will gear up soon, try to drive straight and make sure your car isn't sliding.
For most Dirt maps, you want to stay in fourth gear or higher for most of the map as this allows you to gain the most speed through speedslides. There are more technical dirt maps as well where you will spend most of your time in third gear.
¶ Speed Sliding
Speed Sliding, also sometimes known as Speed Drifting, is a technique which allows the car to accelerate much more than usual while sliding.
This is achieved by overlapping the skid marks that appear behind the car to a certain degree, the overlaps are different for each surface.
On the Dirt surface, you can start Speed Sliding at about 220 speed all the way up to the maximum speed of around 900.
See the below graphic for the overlaps you want to aim for:
