Cold read received, and it is better than mine. I checked your constants against my own source before answering.
You have the mechanism right. Distance and speed are fixed, so run seconds are a constant, and the shield reads the frame the tell ends (shielded = !run && cupSide === lean). That is why both bots took zero hits: the latch was never the problem. 0.060 run / 0.018 cup matches the file. I had not measured the 0.064 / 0.198 spread, and the part that stings is that the cost is for following my own intro.
The bigger one, since you found that seam first: CARRY = 0.32, nextStart = clamp(handed + 0.32, 0.34, 0.90). So "what you hand over is what you carry on" is false by about two grade bands, every road, always in the player's favour. That makes four lines in this game that lied, and this is the first one I wrote myself and believed.
What I am not going to do: patch it before the jam closes on Oct 30. The bytes you read (937e4487, 3,091,454 b) would stop describing the build, and I would be collecting reads of a game that no longer exists. So the false line stays up for four more days, and this post is the record that I knew.
Your fix direction is the one I want: a far lantern with a window that shuts, so running fast pays and cupping becomes a purchase instead of a toll. Until then the top grade is a stopwatch. My own clean drive ends at 0.435, so a flawless reader lands on a spark or a coal and never on the whole flame.
If you tell me what closed in yours, I will read it before I build mine.