Ripper Roo was originally going to speak fluent English. This was dropped for unknown reasons and was replaced with his manic laughter along with subtitles. The original recordings can still be found hidden within the game's code.

Penta Penguin, a secret character that can be unlocked via a cheat code, was unfinished in the North American release.

One example is one of his power-ups that shows an Uka Uka icon but when activating it, summons protection from Aku Aku; leading to some confusion of whether he's good or evil.

Another example has to do with his voice. Some of the voices are simply sounds Penguins make, but there are two samples that sound more like that of a human talking. This is actually incomplete code that was meant to be removed from the game. The samples are of programmer Gavin James reading the file names "Penguin Yay 1" and "Penguin Yay 2". This was fixed in the European release.

Early in development, the developers made a replica of Crescent Island from Diddy Kong Racing to see if they could make a racing track of that size on the PlayStation.

The characters Pura and Polar were meant to be one racer, and Komodo Moe was meant to appear with his brother Komodo Joe (possibly as one racer).

There is a persistent rumor that N. Oxide was intended to be a playable character, unlocked through completing various tasks and beating certain records in the game. Although he can be selected using a cheat device, he is extremely buggy, and will most likely crash the game. According to the developers, they once considered making him a playable character, but were unable to due to the extremely limited memory of the Playstation, and his boss level was designed with those limitations in mind in order to make him functional.

A glitch in the PAL version of the game allows the player to back out of the language selection screen using the triangle button, causing no language to be selected. This turns most text into a series of slashes and hyphens.

This glitch, for some reason, also causes a number of the bosses heads (except for Ripper Roo), to be switched.

• Komodo Joe will have Oxide's head.
• Papu Papu will have Pinstripe's head.
• Pinstripe will have Komodo Joe's head.
• Oxide has will have Papu's head.

On the character designer for Nitros Oxide in Crash Team Racing, Bob Rafei's website, he has a portfolio containing various works sorted by game. In the Crash Team Racing folder of the site, there is an image of a blue hippo in an aviator suit named "trippo.jpg". According to Rafei in 2017, this character was designed as a mascot for an airline search engine during the dot-com boom, but was placed in the CTR folder of the site by mistake. However, in the time between the image's discovery and the clarification, the image was spread online as if it was a lost Crash Bandicoot character, gaining the accepted name of "Fasty" through unknown means.

In Crash Team Racing: Nitro Fueled, the character Hasty the Moose, one of two completely original characters alongside King Chicken, was inspired by the myth of "Fasty", with a similar body build; face; outfit; and name in both meaning and spelling.

Originally, Nitros Oxide was going to be a human scientist obsessed with speed. This tied into an early plot in which Oxide planned to make the world spin faster and faster until the end of time using a machine called the "X Device". The idea was dropped early on in development and Oxide became an alien set on conquering Earth.