Basically, after much trouble, I made the ship effectively have a long invisible "tail" so that if the ship moves through the gate faster than the physics engine can see it there,, the tail will still be in the gate up to a fairly bit higher speed. This is a bit of a game of balance and tuning,, but hopefully the tail will NOT be long enough to produce unwanted triggers, but WILL be long enough that the player will not suffer "missed gates" because the game simply didn't "see" them in it. 

Basically, though,, the arenas are small enough that hopefully the player is encouraged to play the game at the speeds the game was sort of designed around. Of course with the space vehicle, there is plenty of room ,, (infinite?) so there is nothing to stop them occupying vast distances and trying to hit gates at very high speeds ,,, but I'm hoping that I have it in a playable ballpark that mostly players will be kept down by the gate size to a speed that the game should be able to trigger them .

Luckily,, if you're really that interested,, there's nothing to stop you putting up the gates and just not worrying about racemode with the triggers,, and if you want to keep some semblance of time,, you can use the new "manual timer" mode and just that miliseconds of error where you need to hit the button and start,, and then hit the stop button,, you will be able to sort of know for yourself about how the timing went.