I could probably cut another minute and a half out of it. I just didn’t want to make it too short. I’ve seen edits where they’ve made the race simply one lap, but I was never a fan of that. In my opinion, it should be three full laps, which gives Anakin enough time to believably catch Sebulba at the end. And when you keep the three lap structure, you have to include most of the crashes, for continuity sake, otherwise random podracers will just disappear out of nowhere. And I don’t want to cut the Tusken Raiders bits, because that’s one of the few humorous moments in the film that I believe works really, really well.

I can understand why you’d feel like the race starts dragging. It’s just tough finding spots I’m willing to cut. Maybe some of the intro scene. But again, I really like the intro for tension-building. I’ll see what I can do.