10 Best Racing Games on Xbox Game Pass (August 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

Cartoon kart racing with surprisingly deep drift mechanics to master

Crash Team Racing Nitro-Fueled first showed up on the PlayStation 1 back in 1999, right around the time people were still debating whether anything could compete with Mario Kart. And weirdly enough, over two decades later, that debate hasn’t really died down. This rebuilt version bundles together tracks from the original CTR, the sequel Crash Nitro Kart, and vehicles from Crash Tag Team Racing into a single package, which is a pretty generous amount of content before you even start racing. Over 50 characters from the Crash and Spyro universes are playable, split across different stat types covering speed, acceleration, and a balanced middle ground.

But the drift boosting here works differently than in friendlier kart racers out there. You have to time three consecutive button presses during a single slide, and if you chain those drifts back to back across a whole lap, the speed bonuses stack in the background. Experienced players essentially stay boosted through entire tracks this way, and watching them race looks like an entirely different game compared to someone picking it up for the first time. Online lobbies remain active on Xbox thanks to the Game Pass boost from late 2024, which brought in a fresh wave of players. If you’re browsing for best Game Pass racing games in 2026 and want something with far greater depth than you’d expect from a cartoon racer, CTR is well worth your time.

9. Trials Rising

Ride a motorcycle through wild obstacle courses while mastering weight and throttle

Trials Rising has been around since 2000 as a browser game, and it spent years quietly building one of the most obsessive communities in all of gaming. This version, the fourth mainline entry, took the formula global with over 125 obstacle courses set across real-world landmarks. In this game, you ride a motorcycle from left to right across increasingly absurd terrain. Your rider leans forward, leans back, adjusts throttle, and manages weight distribution across ramps, bridges, explosive barrels, and collapsing platforms. Getting through a track is the easy part on beginner courses. Earning gold medals or beating ghost times is where the real challenge begins.

The track editor stands out on its own because it has over 10,000 placeable components, and the community has uploaded thousands of custom creations. Their difficulty ranges from relaxing downhill rolls to courses that took creators hundreds of hours to design. There’s also a tandem bike mode where two players share a single motorcycle, easily one of the funniest multiplayer experiences on Game Pass right now. Leaderboards track your best time on every single course, and the game notifies you when a friend beats your record. If you want something completely different from traditional car racing on Game Pass, Trials delivers.

8. Asphalt Legends

Arcade racing packed with licensed hypercars, wild stunts, and cross-platform multiplayer lobbies

Asphalt Legends has been living on phones for years, and that’s probably why most console players overlook it. Which is a mistake. The Xbox version looks nothing like a mobile port, with licensed hypercars from Lamborghini, Bugatti, Ferrari, Porsche, and as of May 2026, Audi finally joined the roster after years of licensing drama between the two companies. Races are short, roughly two minutes each, and the driving is gloriously over the top. Barrel rolls off ramps, 360 spins to smack rivals out of your lane, shockwave boosts mid-drift. Cross-platform play connects you with everyone on PlayStation, PC, Switch, and mobile simultaneously, which means lobbies fill up at pretty much any hour regardless of your time zone.

Now the catch, and you probably saw it coming. The free-to-play grind is real. Unlocking cars requires collecting blueprints through events and daily challenges, and once you push into the higher car classes, everything slows way down. People on Steam forums have logged hundreds of hours and still sit around 60% career completion without spending a dime. But the actual racing is pretty addictive. For a free title sitting in the Xbox Game Pass racing games 2026 catalog, you get a wild amount of content here.

7. The Crew 2

Drive cars, fly planes, and race boats across a shrunken America

The map here is a compressed version of the continental United States, and you can drive from one coast to the other without a single loading screen breaking the experience. Cars, motorcycles, boats, and planes are all available. And the wildest part, really, is how you switch between them mid-drive. You tap a button, your car morphs into a speedboat the moment you hit water, and your speed carries over like nothing happened. Tap again near open sky and you’re suddenly in a stunt plane. I mean, the first time you drive off a cliff, swap into a plane during freefall, and just keep going, it rewires your expectations of what a racer can be.

The vehicle catalog spans over 550 options across land, water, and air, and customization lets you tweak performance parts and visual appearance on all of them. Racing disciplines, for what it’s worth, cover street racing, drift events, drag strips, off-road runs, powerboat sprints, and aerobatic stuff, so the variety is pretty deep. The Crew 2 attempts to be a car racer, a boat racer, and a flight sim all at once. And while it doesn’t quite master any of those individually, the combination of all three inside one seamless open world is pretty hard to find elsewhere on Game Pass.

6. Need for Speed: Hot Pursuit Remastered

Play as a cop or a racer in supercar pursuits across coastal highways

The Need for Speed series has bounced between so many different identities over the years, from gritty street culture stories to open-world tuner fantasies, and pretty much everything in between. Hot Pursuit Remastered cuts through all of that noise. Two separate careers run parallel here, one as a racer and one as a cop, and both of them share the same roster of Bugattis, Paganis, and Koenigseggs split across five performance tiers. On the cop side, spike strips, EMPs, and even helicopter backup are standard-issue tools for shutting down illegal races. Racers, on the other hand, get jammers and turbo boosts to fight back.

Moreover, there’s this Autolog feature that quietly tracks your friends’ best times on every single event and then nudges you to go beat them, even if they raced three days ago. I personally find that kind of passive rivalry way more motivating than traditional leaderboards. Also, playing as a cop requires a fundamentally different approach compared to racing, since you’re reading the road for takedown opportunities instead of focusing on optimal racing lines. Altogether, this still holds up as one of the tightest cat-and-mouse racers on Game Pass in 2026.

5. Riders Republic

Extreme sports playground with bikes, skis, wingsuits, and pure mayhem

Riders Republic takes a bunch of American national parks, smashes them together into one giant connected map, and then says “here, go wild with bikes, snowboards, skis, wingsuits, and rocket-powered jetpacks.” You can be carving through powder on a steep mountain, launch off a cliff edge, and mid-air swap to a wingsuit to glide into a canyon below. Then as you drift over a dirt trail, switch to a mountain bike and keep rolling. The swap between sports is instant, literally one button press. Pretty quickly you’ll find yourself gravitating toward freestyle, racing, or air sports depending on what clicks.

Meanwhile, the mass races are on a completely different level. Fifty-plus players line up at a mountain peak, the countdown hits zero, and absolute madness follows as everyone barrels downhill together. These races swap your equipment mid-run too, so you might start on a snowboard and suddenly find yourself pedaling a bike around a hairpin turn. Collisions knock riders off course left and right, and climbing from 40th to 10th place can disappear in a second if you clip a rock at the wrong angle. Riders Republic ranks high among the best Game Pass racing games in 2026 because not many titles on the service offer this blend of speed, sport switching, and large-scale multiplayer bedlam.

4. Wheel World

Open-world bicycle adventure with comic-book visuals and spirit quests

So the concept here is quite unusual. Kat, your character, gets chosen by ancient cycling spirits to recover stolen legendary bike parts and save the universe. Yeah, on a bicycle. Her ghost companion Skully tags along for the ride, and you spend most of your time racing against rival cycling gangs to build up enough rep for the bigger showdowns. The actual riding takes a minute to click, because pedaling into a sharp turn is a guaranteed crash. You need to release the throttle before corners, coast through them, and then hammer back on the speed coming out. Drafting behind other cyclists fills up a boost meter too, which becomes essential once the rival gangs get faster.

And then there’s the bike customization, which is far more involved than you’d expect. Seven swappable parts, four attributes like aerodynamics and grip, and you can genuinely turn your ride into either a lightweight road rocket or a chunky off-road machine depending on the race ahead. The open world is stuffed with hidden boxes containing bike parts, and I mean stuffed. You’ll spot them mid-race and immediately want to circle back afterward. Races are scattered organically across the map rather than tucked inside menus, so competition and free-roaming stay connected throughout. Distinct landmarks across the map guide you naturally from one area to the next.

3. DiRT Rally 2.0

Listen to your co-driver or end up in a ditch within seconds flat

DiRT Rally 2.0 is the closest thing to actually sitting inside a rally car that you’ll find on Game Pass. There’s a co-driver sitting next to you who is barking out pace notes the entire time. “Left five, tightens, caution.” “Right three into hairpin, don’t cut.” You live and die by those calls because the roads are way too fast and twisty to figure out by just looking ahead. Also, the team recorded his voice three separate times at different stress levels using a motion rig, so when you’re crawling through a tricky section he sounds composed, but the moment you’re flying at full speed his calls turn into rapid-fire bursts. Tire choice is a big deal during races, since soft compounds grip better early but wear out fast, while hard ones last longer but slide around more.

Between stages you get a quick pit stop to fix damage and change tires, but the repair window is limited. If you pick the wrong priority, you’re dragging a bent suspension into the next run. The car lineup goes from tiny vintage Minis that bounce around like tin cans on gravel all the way to 1980s Group B monsters with ridiculous horsepower. And honestly, those Group B cars are terrifying to push hard. Your palms genuinely sweat. Everything here asks you to plan ahead and stay focused, and the smallest lapse in concentration has consequences. Even after hundreds of hours, the margins between a clean run and a catastrophic spin remain razor-thin.

2. Wreckfest

The best crash-heavy racer you’ll find on Xbox Game Pass today

You know how every racing game tells you to drive clean and avoid contact? Wreckfest throws that idea straight in the bin. The cars here are rusted, beaten-up junkyard machines, and the goal half the time is to smash into everyone else until they can’t drive anymore. Bumpers crumple, doors rip off mid-race, hoods fold up and block your windshield, and somehow you’re still trying to limp across the finish line in whatever twisted metal is left. The AI drivers are hilarious too, because they spin out on dirt corners, crash into each other for absolutely zero reason, and pile up at intersections.

And then you’ve got challenge events where you’re racing lawnmowers, motorized couches, and crop harvesters against each other. I can’t tell you why racing a sofa on a figure-eight track is so entertaining, but it really is. On the flip side, customization is sneakily strategic. Bolting on heavier armor like roll cages and reinforced bumpers protects you from big hits, but your car gets noticeably slower. Strip all that off and you’re quick, but one solid crash from a rival might fold your frame in half. Meanwhile, online multiplayer with up to 24 players turns every corner into a demolition lottery. The unpredictability is what pulls people back in, because even after dozens of races, the physics engine still produces moments you couldn’t plan or replicate.

1. Forza Horizon 6

Easily the top open-world racer to land on Game Pass in 2026

Japan has been the most requested setting in this franchise for years, and Forza Horizon 6 finally delivers on it. You start as a tourist this time around, which is pretty different from older Horizon games where you were already a known racer. The car roster leans heavily into JDM culture, with the Nissan Silvia, Toyota Sprinter Trueno, Mazda RX-7, and Honda S2000 all sitting alongside international supercars. Kei cars even carry proper Japanese license plate designations, the kind of attention to accuracy that tells you the team did their homework. On top of the driving itself, customization received a significant overhaul: you can paint windows for the first time in any Forza game, equip different wheel sets on front and rear axles, and tire sidewalls now show cosmetic wear the more you drive on them.

And here’s something worth pointing out about this one. Slower cars actually drive well now. In older Horizon games, you’d grab a stock sedan or a little kei van and it would come across as floaty and pointless until you swapped in a bigger engine and bolted on a turbo. That’s changed here. You can just cruise around in a bone-stock ride and it still responds with enough weight and feedback to hold your attention. The steering got reworked too, with 540 degrees of rotation support in cockpit view, and engine sounds are noticeably better across the board. In short, the combination of Japan’s geography, the franchise’s signature handling model, and the sheer volume of content here makes this the definitive pick among the best racing games on Xbox Game Pass for 2026.

FAQs

Do I need Xbox Game Pass Ultimate to play all these racing games?

It depends on the specific title. Wreckfest, Crash Team Racing Nitro-Fueled, and Need for Speed: Hot Pursuit Remastered are available across multiple Game Pass tiers, including Essential. Forza Horizon 6, on the other hand, launched as a day-one addition exclusive to Game Pass Ultimate and PC Game Pass, so the lower-tier subscriptions don’t include it. Asphalt Legends is free-to-play regardless of your subscription level, which means you can grab it even without Game Pass.

Can I play these Game Pass racing games offline without an internet connection?

Several of them do support offline play. Crash Team Racing Nitro-Fueled, Wreckfest, DiRT Rally 2.0, and Forza Horizon 6 all let you race through their single-player content without a connection. The Crew 2 received an offline mode through a late 2025 update, which was a big relief after the original Crew game was permanently shut down. Riders Republic and Asphalt Legends, by contrast, require a constant internet connection since they rely on shared online worlds. If you have unreliable internet, stick with the titles that offer full offline campaigns.

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

If you’re planning a couch session with friends, Crash Team Racing Nitro-Fueled is your best bet since it supports up to four players in local split-screen across all of its race modes. Asphalt Legends also offers local split-screen for up to four players on a single console. Wreckfest and Trials Rising both include local multiplayer options as well, though Wreckfest limits it to two players. Forza Horizon 6, surprisingly, does not feature split-screen despite being the most high-profile racer on the list, so keep that in mind if local co-op is a priority for you.

Do any of these racing games support a steering wheel on Xbox?

DiRT Rally 2.0 and Forza Horizon 6 are the two titles here that benefit the most from a wheel and pedal setup. DiRT Rally 2.0 practically transforms into a different experience with force feedback, since the co-driver calls and surface changes become much more tactile through a wheel. Forza Horizon 6 also received rebuilt steering support with up to 540 degrees of rotation, and the cockpit camera finally matches your physical wheel inputs accurately. Wreckfest technically supports wheels too, though the chaotic nature of demolition derbies makes a controller more practical in most situations. The remaining titles on this list are designed primarily around controller input.

Are these racing games available on PC through Game Pass as well?

Most of them are, yes. Forza Horizon 6, DiRT Rally 2.0, Wreckfest, Trials Rising, Wheel World, and The Crew 2 are all accessible through PC Game Pass. Crash Team Racing Nitro-Fueled is the notable exception here, as it remains a console-exclusive title with no PC version available. Need for Speed: Hot Pursuit Remastered is accessible on PC through EA Play, which comes bundled with Game Pass Ultimate. If you primarily game on a laptop or desktop, the majority of this list is still fully available to you.

How often do racing games get removed from Xbox Game Pass?

Games rotate in and out of Game Pass on a monthly basis, and Microsoft (MSFT ) typically announces removals about two weeks in advance. Titles published by Xbox Game Studios, like Forza Horizon 6, tend to stay in the catalog permanently since Microsoft owns them. Third-party games like Wreckfest, Trials Rising, and Need for Speed: Hot Pursuit Remastered are on licensing agreements that eventually expire, so they could leave at some point. If you’re deep into a particular title and see a removal announcement, Game Pass subscribers usually get a discount on purchasing the game outright to keep it in your library.

Do any of these racing games support cross-platform multiplayer?

Asphalt Legends stands out here with full cross-platform play across Xbox, PlayStation, PC, Switch, and mobile devices, so the online player pool is massive. Need for Speed: Hot Pursuit Remastered also supports cross-platform multiplayer across all platforms it’s available on. Riders Republic connects Xbox, PlayStation, and PC players in its shared world and mass races. Forza Horizon 6 currently supports cross-play between Xbox and PC players, though PlayStation 5 cross-play details are still pending since that version hasn’t launched yet. Crash Team Racing Nitro-Fueled unfortunately lacks cross-play entirely, so you’re limited to racing against other Xbox players online.

Will my progress carry over if a game leaves Game Pass and I buy it later?

Yes, your save data stays intact. Game Pass downloads are identical to purchased copies of the same game, so all your career progress, unlocked cars, and custom settings are saved to your Xbox profile and the cloud. If a title leaves Game Pass and you decide to buy it afterward, you’ll pick up right where you left off. This applies to both digital purchases and disc copies on Xbox. The transition is seamless, and you won’t lose a single lap time or garage build you’ve put together during your subscription period.