Another attempt at the crowd...
Centre marble blurred a little. The bottom marble was never blurred. I think the blurring here accomplishes the opposite of what it's supposed to - makes centre marble look more like a pool, rather than less.
Yes, those are Vs. Jota, my sources seem to think that there was a K in the Roman alphabet (a bit surprising to me too) - the letters that they wouldn't recognize were the w, z, u and of course the offending J. So while the K in counterclockwise seems to be ok, the w should actually be vv, but I tried that and I think it would only confuse people; this is also why I won't change K even if you convince me it wasn't a letter - while the v-for-u thing is obviously understood, I think some people will get a little lost with covntercloccvvise. As for Julian, I wanted to avoid jumping to L - even if K is a letter, there were no emperors whose names started with K.
Messed with the wreck a little. I really want to make it work.
Yes, the racers were all in the inside lanes, which is of course where they would try to be in a race. Unfortunately, because of the confusion that was tied to my attempt at staggering the lane lengths to make it tactically more advantageous to take the inner lane on the map, it's hard to mirror this in gameplay without bonuses, which I'd like to avoid. So I've tried to embrace the fiction that racers would actually go to the outside and moved a few of them out. That's also part of why I wanted the wreck in there - to justify pushing some racers outside who need to go around it - kind of like you avoiding an opponent's large army buildup sitting still on the inside track.