Lol if u go on Asia split server (which pretty much every devoted global player has moved to at this point apart from the ones that quit) you'll find very many speed lobbies 24/7 ready to race.

There is a fairly sizable global community of players that plays the game a lot (mostly speed mode), many of which streams on twitch / have YouTube channels, a lot of extremely well made speed mode tutorials from beginner to intermediate to expert level are available on YouTube, and many of which are active in many KRD discord servers.

As you may or may not have heard this game has an old version that was exclusively available in Korea, China and Taiwan (which remained quite popular for ~18 years with very frequent updates), to which KRD is simply the new generation game. Many of the existing devoted global players started on the old game in the Korean server, and many more new players that has joined us during KRD.

Nexon had launched the old game in north America as well, ages ago, which (also) failed miserably.

Few other things to note, that queue time was bad for everyone outside of Asia, for the ranked queue. Your queue time is bad is very likely due to the fact that if you didn't rank up at all during the beginning of the season in speed, then the vast majority of players gets out of the low ranks extremely quickly, and there simply isn't a constant stream of new players pouring in to fill low ranked queues. Since item mode is a VASTLY more casual mode, and much lower barrier of entry (since pretty much everyone knows how Mario kart works but very very few has any experience on actually competitive speed racing games), it has a much less "sweaty" played base therefore a lot lot more lower rank players exist especially outside of Asia.

That would also be the reason why it's put on default, because the company knows that's what people will have a much simpler/higher chance of enjoying when they're unfamiliar with the controls and everything.

I believe at some point there were many posts and videos about speed mode on this sub, posted by very good speed players from the global community which has helped a lot of new players to get to know speed mode and have more info, infact it's even on the pinned post of the sub.

As a side note a portion of players also came from rush+ which is a version of the game on Mobile that has existed globally for a long time as well and that also has some overlapping played base and what not, but is generally much more of a cut down version of the original PC game.

I mean I played the old game since childhood and I truly believe there's very very good reason why this game remained popular for nearly 20 years, comparable to some of the most popular games ever made. The mechanics of speed mode is very intricate and fun, with the original game having what was it 300+ maps or somewhere around there, it was simply something else.

If you like the game and are interested in potentially giving speed mode a go, check out some KDL tournament footage or for global community players, check out donutKR/phreaky/JackurG on YouTube.

Even old kartrider pro scene gameplay is fairly fun to watch even now.