A Shield pickup.
This pickup would have a very low drop rate, so that interactions between players could still happen rather normally throughout the race - however, if you're lucky enough, you'd find yourself protected by a quicksilver layer of immunity that would make you live through every sort of mayhem that's thrown at you, for a very short period of time (4-5 secs perhaps?)
This sort of mechanics was seem in Re-Volt's sucessor, RC Revenge:
Speaking with Ciccio, he also told me that this would probably be one of the easiest new pickups to introduce, since its basically a silver sheet enveloping the car (like the Battery or Zap glow) and it cleans all the effects of other pickups on the car using it.
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Another thing that has been discussed in the past, is a new interaction between pickups (akin to battery cleaning zaps/stars) - Water Balloons defusing the Bomb.
Since the Bomb has a fuse, it teoretically can be put out by water - if a car yielding a Bomb would put itself in arms way of a Balloon, the bomb would be automatically cleansed. This would be a rather interesting gambit, because while the bomb effect on each car is mostly randomized, the effect of Water Balloons in some cars would be rather predictable. This would also spark new interactions between players, since you would not want to "balloon" a player already yielding a Bomb ahead of you.
Lastly, since Water Boxes are actually a thing already present in the game, why not also cleanse the Bomb whenever a car steps into one?
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Once again, these new additions would be completely optional, as to not hinder the classic gaming experience.
