While playing in City Trial on a good flying vehicle, there are two locations where flowers are hidden.

The first flower is at the highest point of castle hall, on a very small point.

The second flower is on the corner of Heat Top, at the highest point.

Both flowers serve no purpose, yet are believed to be small gifts to the players that find them.

Kirby Air Ride shares numerous concepts with Kirby's Air Ride, a similarly titled game that was in development for the Nintendo 64 only to be cancelled. When the game was first announced, it was known as Kirby Bowl 64. A year later, the name was changed to Kirby's Air Ride along with many elements. Reportedly, the game's development was very long and was mostly quiet. After the game went through many changes, it was eventually cancelled. While it was widely believed that the project was revived as the GameCube title Kirby Air Ride, series creator Masahiro Sakurai denied they were related in a 2025 YouTube video, stating that Kirby's Air Ride was more in line with a snowboarding game than a kart racing game, but nonetheless shared many similar ideas.

The game's debug menu looks almost exactly like the debug menu for Super Smash Bros. Melee. Both games were developed by HAL Laboratory.

The song for the Magma Flows track sounds very similar to the theme for Tim Burton's film "BettleJuice".

The game features one of the largest debug modes found on the GameCube. It has a wealth of debugging features which provide extensive information on how the game was made.

The box art in the American version shows Kirby angry, with the title above him, on the Japanese box art Kirby is smiling and the title is at the bottom.

The music that plays during the Checker Knights course is the same music from a track that plays in the Kirby of the Stars Anime (Renamed Kirby: Right back at Ya in the English Dub) titled "Strong Star Warrior".

The Japanese version didn't have a number of completed challenges and total challenges in the Checklist screen. This was a feature added to the international versions of the game.

According to series creator and director Masahiro Sakurai, he was initially only in an advisory role for the development of Kirby Air Ride, as he was overseeing multiple projects meant to tie in with the franchise's anime adaptation, Kirby: Right Back at Ya! He preferred to "leave that work to the people responsible for it", and largely gave feedback on the game's presentation to help it "nail that Kirby 'feel'". However, the game suffered from protracted development, as none of the vehicles functioned properly after a full year of work, prompting lead programmer Kouichi Watanabe to ask Sakurai to direct the game. He claimed that the game was rebuilt "from scratch" within just three and a half months, attributing this to the game's visual assets already being finished, the loyalty of the rest of the team, and the rewritten code making it easier for him to give each vehicle unique characteristics through minor adjustments. Sakurai felt that the nature of his involvement resulted in him viewing Kirby Air Ride as "one of [his] creative works," unlike other Kirby games from that period. He left HAL Laboratory after its development finished and would not direct another Kirby game until the 2025 sequel Kirby Air Riders.