10 Best Racing Games on Xbox Game Pass (September 2026)

Looking for the best racing games on Xbox Game Pass? Game Pass is packed with exciting racing games. Some focus on fast cars and smooth tracks, while others take you through wild landscapes and stunt-filled courses. Each game brings something special. With so many great options, choosing can take time, so here is the updated list of the top Game Pass racing games available right now.

What Defines the Best Racing Game?

When I look for a racing game that really hits, it needs more than just fast cars. I want something that keeps me coming back after hours of play. Fun gameplay comes first, then a mix of different race types, good car variety, and something that feels fresh every time. Some games should let you drive across open areas, others should give tight tracks with high tension. I also look at how the game feels during long sessions, how the cars react, and how much there is to do. The games on this list bring different styles of racing, but all of them deliver pure fun.

Now that the key ingredients of a great racing game are clear, it’s time to look at the titles that truly deliver on those expectations. Here are ten racing games available on Xbox Game Pass that stand out for their gameplay, variety, and replay value.

10. Crash Team Racing Nitro-Fueled

Kart racing where drifting well matters more than luck ever will

Crash Team Racing Nitro-Fueled is a remaster of the original 1999 kart racer from the Crash Bandicoot franchise, so if you’ve played any kart racer before, the setup is familiar. You pick a character, race against opponents on themed tracks, smash crates for items, and try to cross the finish line first. However, CTR has always been the more skill-heavy alternative compared to other kart racers out there. See, plenty of kart racers depend almost entirely on item pickups to shake up the results, where a player near the back can grab a powerful item and wreck the leader’s whole run. CTR does have items too, but winning here really comes down to how well you can drift around corners and chain boosts together.

If you mess up your timing during a drift, you miss that boost entirely. Nail it, and you can stack multiple boosts back-to-back until your kart is moving at absurd speeds. The gap between a good player and a casual one is massive because of how much execution matters. Plus, the AI opponents are surprisingly aggressive here, so even offline races can get competitive. Lastly, the roster has 56 characters, along with character skins, podium animations, and loads of kart customization, so there’s a wild amount of content packed in here for an Xbox Game Pass racing game.

9. Trials Rising

Balance a dirt bike across obstacle courses where crashing is half the entertainment

Trials Rising is a motorcycle game, yet you’re barely racing in the traditional sense. You ride across side-scrolling obstacle courses on a dirt bike, balancing your rider’s weight through ramps, steep climps, exploding platforms, all sorts of absurd stuff. Every course is basically a physics puzzle disguised as a race. So even a small tap on the throttle at the wrong moment can send your rider ragdolling into a wall, which, of course, looks hilarious every single time. Plus, ghost riders from other players show up on your screen during runs. If they beat your time, their avatar can taunt you on the results screen, complete with kazoo music. Annoying? Absolutely. Still, it also makes you want to retry immediately.

The community-made tracks deserve their own mention here because players have built courses that go way beyond what you’ll find in the regular campaign. Some custom courses exist purely to launch your rider into oblivion in creative ways, while others are so precisely tuned that finishing them can require hundreds of attempts. Beyond the solo stuff, there’s a local co-op option where two people control the same motorcycle at once, with each player contributing half of the bike’s power and balance. It goes about as smoothly as you’d expect, which is to say, terribly. And honestly, that’s what makes it so good.

8. SpeedRunners 2: King of Speed

Side-scrolling multiplayer racing with grappling hooks and screen elimination

SpeedRunners 2: King of Speed landed on Game Pass as a day-one title in September 2026, and it’s been a go-to pick for quick competitive sessions since then. Here’s how it works: everyone races through looping 2D tracks at the same time, but the camera keeps the leaders in view. So if you fall too far behind, you literally go off-screen, and you’re out. Once the first player gets eliminated, a ring of fire starts closing in from the edges, shrinking the visible area down until the last runner standing wins the round. Individual rounds can wrap up incredibly fast, which makes it dangerously easy to keep queuing up “just one more.”

But the speed alone doesn’t carry it. You can swing off ceilings, slide under obstacles, wall-jump around tight corners, and use pickups like missiles or freeze rays to knock opponents off their rhythm. Still, crossplay across PC and consoles gives you a wider pool of people to race against. SpeedRunners 2 is an easy racer recommendation on Game Pass right now, more so if you’ve got friends who enjoy trash-talking over short, frantic rounds. Lastly, Fair Play Labs handled development on the sequel, the same studio that worked on Nickelodeon All-Star Brawl 2, and the movement carries a fluid, parkour-like feel throughout.

7. The Crew 2

Race across a miniature United States on land, water, or sky

The Crew 2 has one of the biggest maps in any racing game. It’s a massive compressed recreation of the continental U.S., filled with open road, coastline, desert, farmland, mountains, and major cities. So yeah, the scale is absurd. Well, the map alone wouldn’t be worth much if all you did was drive cars through it, however. The Crew 2 also has motorcycles, speedboats, planes, hovercraft, even monster trucks. You can switch vehicles while exploring, swap to a plane, fly over whatever’s in your way, then switch again into a speedboat as you head toward the water.

And because of all that variety, the racing itself covers a huge range of disciplines. Street racing, drag events, drift challenges, rallycross, jet sprints, aerobatic courses, touring car competitions. You can also form a four-player crew and tackle events together. Plus, Ubisoft added an offline mode last year, so an internet connection isn’t mandatory for the core game anymore. For a racer on Game Pass, The Crew 2 probably offers more hours of content than almost anything else on the list, even if the handling skews heavily toward arcade territory.

6. Need for Speed: Hot Pursuit Remastered

Cops versus racers in exotic supercars with weaponized gadgets

Need for Speed: Hot Pursuit Remastered is the franchise going back to one of the ideas that made it popular in the first place. Long before the Underground street racing era, cops chasing exotic cars was already a defining part of Need for Speed. And the same studio behind the Burnout series handled the original version of Hot Pursuit back in 2010, so the crash physics, the weight of the cars, the way a wreck sends your vehicle spinning into a guardrail at ridiculous speed, all of it has that Burnout DNA running through it. Still, the cars carry more weight here, more grounded than a typical Burnout ride.

The career lets you play both sides, either racing as an outlaw or joining the cops, with the main pursuit events throwing both against each other. Both sides carry gadgets too, like electromagnetic pulse blasts and spike strips, plus signal jammers for racers and helicopter backup for cops. It turns into something more than a straight race, because in those pursuit events, someone’s always trying to ruin your run. Additionally, your friends’ best times on every event show up automatically, and the game keeps nudging you to beat them. For an arcade racer built around high-speed chases and split-second calls, Need for Speed: Hot Pursuit Remastered still delivers what you’d want from a cops-versus-racers game.

5. Riders Republic

Extreme sports chaos where dozens of players race off a mountain together

Riders Republic stitches together several extreme sports into one open world, and the multiplayer chaos alone justifies the spot on any best Game Pass racing games in 2026 list. You’ve got biking, skiing, snowboarding, wingsuit flying, even rocket-powered gear scattered across a map made up of mashed-together national park landscapes. However, the biggest attraction are the mass races. Dozens of players all launch into the same course at once, bumping into each other and swapping between sports mid-race through checkpoints, going from a bike to skis to a rocket wingsuit in seconds. It’s absurd. You can be sitting in first place for a brief moment, make one tiny mistake, and the swarm behind you swallows your position immediately.

Still, outside of those races, the open world has a relaxed vibe to it. You can just cruise around on a bike, hit a random trail, do a few tricks off a cliff edge, or jump into nearby events with other riders. Plus, the overall progression gives you plenty of reasons to bounce between different disciplines, even though each sport has its own career path. In that sense, Riders Republic covers a lot of ground for people who get bored doing the same type of race over and over again.

4. Wheel World

Save the universe by winning bike races across a colorful open world

Wheel World is Messhof’s first 3D game, which is a wild jump considering they’re best known for Nidhogg, a hyper-minimalist 2D sword-fighting game. Going from pixel fencing duels to a semi-open-world cycling adventure with a narrative? It’s a massive shift. You play as Kat, a rider who wakes up in a colorful world and soon finds a busted old bike inhabited by a ghostly companion named Skully. Skully’s legendary bike parts have been stolen, and your job is to race rival cycling gangs, earn reputation, and recover those parts to perform a ritual that literally saves the entire world. On a bicycle. Through racing.

Now, the gameplay loop is “Roam, Race, and Wrench.” You cruise around Tramonto discovering bike parts, then swap and mix components across seven different slots on your ride, tweaking Power, Aero, Handling, and Grip to suit each race. Certain parts even come with unique perks like gaining speed when you stop steering or getting extra boost from drafting behind opponents. If you’re browsing an Xbox Game Pass racing games 2026 list and want something calm, Wheel World is your pick.

3. DiRT Rally 2.0

Unforgiving rally simulation where one wrong turn ends everything

DiRT Rally 2.0 is, of course, a rally racer. But the thing that separates rally from regular track racing is something most people overlook: you often can’t see enough of the road ahead to react in time. Seriously. You’re tearing through gravel, mud, or wet tarmac on narrow roads between trees, and the turns come at you way too fast to rely on your eyes alone. You depend heavily on a voice in the passenger seat calling out what’s coming next, stuff like how sharp the curve is or how far until the next bend. It’s quite fascinating because the team actually strapped a real championship co-driver into a motion rig, shook him around, and recorded the calls three separate times at different intensity levels.

The game can switch between calmer and more stressed versions of those calls depending on what’s happening during the stage. If you misjudge a call or brake half a second late, your car clips a rock or slides off into a ditch, and that damage can carry into the next stage if you don’t get a chance to repair it. Mind you, there’s no rewind button either, and a run gone wrong is just… gone. You deal or you restart. Softer tyres give more grip but wear out quicker, while harder ones last longer but cost you some pace. So each choice before a stage stacks on top of each choice during it. Hands down the strongest rally racer in the Xbox Game Pass library.

2. Wreckfest

Smash, ram, and demolish your way to victory in banger races

Wreckfest is probably the closest thing to those old Destruction Derby games from the 90s, but on modern hardware. Every car in here is banged up, scratched, patched together from spare parts, and most of them are fictional vehicles heavily inspired by actual models. That also gives the game plenty of freedom to absolutely destroy them during a race. Metal bends, bumpers rip clean off mid-corner, hoods fold in on themselves after a solid hit. And the damage actually affects how your car drives afterward, so a rough first lap can snowball into a disaster by lap three if you keep trading paint.

Furthermore, you can race lawn mowers, school buses, a literal motorized sofa, crop harvesters, buggies, and all sorts of weird contraptions. There’s even a tiny kids’ car called the Pocket Rocket, massively underpowered but hilarious to drive against full-size sedans. The career mode strings together championships across different vehicle classes, so you’ll bounce between proper banger races on dirt ovals, arena events, and courses where traffic comes flying head-on toward you. This game is a constant push-pull between wanting to survive the mayhem or outrun it.

1. Forza Horizon 6

The strongest open-world racing title added to Game Pass in 2026

Forza Horizon 6 landed the series in Japan, and it was about time. Fans had been asking for Japan since the very first game over a decade ago. So when it finally showed up on Game Pass, the hype was justified. You start your journey as a random tourist arriving at the Horizon Festival, zero fame, zero reputation. And the climb from there to becoming a Horizon Legend actually requires effort, which is a big shift from the previous game where you were basically handed everything on a silver platter right away. The map, meanwhile, blends dense city streets, mountain passes, coastal roads, and countryside into one connected open world, and the vertical elevation changes across it feel massive compared to older entries.

But the part that grabbed me most is the mountain pass head-to-head racing. Two cars, narrow winding roads, tight hairpins, and precision over raw power. If you’ve ever watched Japanese street racing culture in anime or movies, you’ll recognize the vibe immediately. Lighter rear-wheel-drive cars dominate here, so brute-forcing your way through in an overpowered machine doesn’t cut it. Plus, you can buy homes around the map, customize your garage interiors, and even invite friends in to check them out. As far as the best racing games on Xbox Game Pass go, Forza Horizon 6 comfortably claims the crown.

FAQs

Do you need a steering wheel to enjoy any of these Game Pass games?

You can play every game on this list comfortably on a standard Xbox controller. However, simulation-heavy titles like DiRT Rally 2.0 benefit a lot from a wheel and pedal setup because the force feedback makes the car behavior feel way more responsive under your hands. But if you don’t have one, don’t stress about it. Even DiRT Rally 2.0 is perfectly playable on a controller once you get used to the sensitivity settings.

On the flip side, arcade-style titles like Crash Team Racing Nitro-Fueled, SpeedRunners 2: King of Speed, and Riders Republic are built around controller input from the ground up. So a gamepad is all you need there.

Which of these racing games support split-screen or local co-op?

Crash Team Racing Nitro-Fueled is your best bet here since it supports up to four players on the same screen. Wreckfest also has split-screen multiplayer, which is great for couch sessions where you just want to smash into each other. Most of the other titles on the list, like Forza Horizon 6 and Riders Republic, focus on online multiplayer instead.

So if local co-op is a priority for you, Crash Team Racing Nitro-Fueled is the clear pick.

What’s the best starting point if you’ve never played a racing game before?

Forza Horizon 6 is the easiest recommendation because the difficulty adjusts to your comfort level, and the open-world structure lets you explore at your own pace without any pressure. You can ease into races gradually rather than get thrown into competitive events right away. Plus, the assists are generous enough that even a complete beginner can have a good time from the first race.

Need for Speed: Hot Pursuit Remastered is another solid option too. The cops-versus-racers concept is simple to grasp, and the arcade-style handling doesn’t punish small mistakes as harshly.

Which of these racing games also run on Xbox One or are they all Series X/S only?

Most of them actually run on Xbox One as well. Wreckfest, DiRT Rally 2.0, Need for Speed: Hot Pursuit Remastered, Crash Team Racing Nitro-Fueled, Trials Rising, The Crew 2, and SpeedRunners 2: King of Speed are all available on last-gen hardware. However, Forza Horizon 6 and Wheel World are exclusive to Xbox Series X/S and PC, so you’d need current-gen hardware for those two.

If you’re still on Xbox One, you’ve got plenty of options on the list. But the two biggest entries do require an upgrade.

Can these racing games get removed from Game Pass without warning?

Yes, and it happens more often than you’d think. Microsoft rotates titles in and out of Game Pass on a regular basis, usually with about two weeks of notice before a game leaves. However, first-party titles like Forza Horizon 6 tend to stay permanently since they’re published by Xbox themselves.

Third-party games like Wreckfest, Crash Team Racing Nitro-Fueled, and Need for Speed: Hot Pursuit Remastered can rotate out depending on licensing agreements. So if something catches your eye on the list, it’s better to jump in sooner rather than wait.

If you only have time for one game on this Game Pass racing games list, which should it be?

Forza Horizon 6, and it’s an easy call. The variety of content is enormous, the car roster covers over 550 vehicles, and you can sink hundreds of hours into it between the campaign, multiplayer events, and creative tools. It also caters to every skill level, so whether you’re a casual driver or a hardcore racer, there’s something there for you.

Still, if destruction and chaos are more your speed than clean racing, Wreckfest is the one to grab. Completely different vibe, but equally hard to put down.

Which of these lean more toward arcade racing versus simulation?

Crash Team Racing Nitro-Fueled, SpeedRunners 2: King of Speed, Need for Speed: Hot Pursuit Remastered, and Riders Republic are firmly on the arcade side. They prioritize speed, spectacle, and accessibility over realistic car behavior. Forza Horizon 6 sits somewhere in the middle since it blends arcade freedom with optional simulation assists.

On the simulation end, DiRT Rally 2.0 is the most demanding title on the list. Every surface change affects grip, and a single miscalculated turn can ruin an entire stage run. If you want something between those two extremes, Wreckfest has surprisingly weighty car physics despite all the chaos.