1. Make sure you are not in a freighter, can be done in one, but not recommended, and might require some Rogain to get your pulled out hair back.

2. Engage cruise engines (in free flight mode) immediately. For a little boost to 80 use your afterburners very briefly then hit cruise.

3. If he leads, stay on his tail, he will mess up towards the end. Or just cut your corners where you can.

Best of luck!

As soon as the mission begins, engage your cruise engines. Don't use the goto or dock commands, and don't bother selecting waypoints. Just hit Shift+W (in the default keboard layout) to engage cruise engines, and use mouseflight to make your way through the race gates. Strafe keys are useful on some of the more bendy bits of the course, but ultimately they aren't neccessary if you're in a relatively nimble ship. If you hit cruise engines relatively early, and don't miss the gates, you'll certainly win. Of course, he sends some goons after you towards the end of the race, but just ignore them, as their fire is inconsequential.

Anik

Try to get your ship close to the ring when you turn

Shelak the corsair

Long live to corsairs

Yeah, just be sure to hit cruise *immediately* when you start, and then just try to cut the rings as close as you can. I would always look ahead to the next ring before I got to the one ahead of me so I knew the best way to go through, that way you can try not to swerve all over the place (but a couple times I had to strafe over a bit to avoid hitting the ring...that may have messed me a up a bit had i not avoided it ). I was in a Bretonian HF, and I got ahead of him about 1/3 of the way through and never saw him again. Just ignore that stuff at the end. I don't know what he tries to do, but it didn't work.