Hmmmm... the goal of Carmageddon is to cause armageddon with your car? Who would have guessed. The checkpoints are just free credits. You can be a checkpoint chaser if you want because it's not hard to cause chaos along the way.

people dont know this????

Basiclly I do everything on ech level. First wreck few cars and leave like 2 of them, then chase checkopints, going offroad and grab some bonuses. At this point I usually cahve over 15 minutes of time which in most cases is enough to get trough all checpoints. Killing peds by the way increase to over 20 minutes which in C1 stops the timer.

Start the race and run over anything that moves for extra time.

the timer goes up to 19.59

From what I remember all you need to do is to smash/kill other car and that alone should give you many minutes. But I used to play mainly second one. In Carmag2 I usually had 10 minutes shortly after the start after I smashed first car.

You know it's not a racing game right? Checkpoints give you points and you can win a round by completing the circuit a few times but the point is more to drive around creating carnage and destruction. The first stage has an entire football stadium that's super not on the "track" where you can rack up so much time and so many points running over the football players and messing around with the power-ups. The description for one of the stages even calls you a weirdo if you're a "checkpoint chaser". I think maybe you don't remember this being an issue because kid you understood this isn't a racing game heh. It doesn't even give you your position in the "race"!