This one appears to be a genuine bug. It appears to be that my coding is adequate, but the unity physics engine requires specific setup that I don't have the knowledge to properly perform. At present, I've changed some settings, and the result has been this:: at first, I had an issue where always the same "next hoop" would not register that I had flown through it. THe same hoop, on a different lap, would work normally, but on the same lap of the course, without fail, it would require me to go through it twice to register.  ,,, ,Very strange,, I changed some settings, it didn't fix it,, I re"built" the course order (normal gameplay of building a course), and it fixed it that time, after changing the settings. THen, I played in a build with the change in settings, it went back to how it was, then I rebuilt the game (a unity task of "building game" where the engine reproduces the files) aaaaaand it fixed it. I've only tested once through, though, as it takes over a half an hour sometimes. 

presently,, it appears to be fixed, although it is likely that occasionally a particular hoop placed by the player will not register on the first pass. In this case, there appears to be no solution but to fly through it again. Perhaps it is possible to change which hoop it is or do other shenanigans that officially are unrelated, but for the moment I seem to have changed something, and observed the issue go away ?? Apparently the unity physics engine has a bunch of known behaviors with known optimizations to account for this, but honestly it will just take me a while to learn these things,, the documentation is not really designed for teaching such as myself, it's for programmers already immersed in knowing all of these common problems over time. SO far my biggest complaint with unity is that the documentation appears to be intentionally stripped of any instances of rewording (normally used for clarity) that might give confidence to a first time reader. Rather, these authors decided a riddle would be nice, where it DOES mean that,, ,, sure,,, it is not direct, it is not concise,, and it doesn't HAVE to mean that,, but it doesn't specifically say it doesn't. (Again,, if you are already familiar and double checking,, you can make use of it and eventually find the one little quip you were looking for,,, but if you are new, you will not be certain of what you just read until you normally can check it against examples,, some topics are not so well covered in examples however.).