Quote Originally Posted by blackwiggle View Post
The first thing I did was just to go around every track really slowly to find where all the skill cuts were, a lot of them you wouldn't notice if traveling at speed, and since they can make your times faster, it would seem best practice to learn the quickest route first, then improve your times from there.
Also, there are some skill cuts that are just as fast as the normal route, but provides access to barrel rolls that are not normally accessible. Once you find skill cuts, try to figure out how to effectively use them too!

In addition to blackwiggle's already excellent advice is to do the same thing to find all the barrel roll spots. You cannot elite pass a lot of the TT challenges without knowing all of the easier ones.