A speed drill only works if it's actually timed and actually adapts — a worksheet you can take as long as you like on doesn't train speed, it trains patience. Here's what makes a drill effective, and how to run one yourself.
Without a clock, it's easy to solve 7 × 8 by adding 7 eight times in your head and never notice you're doing it — you get the right answer, so it feels like the fact is "known." A visible countdown makes that slower strategy uncomfortable enough that recall starts winning instead, which is the actual goal of a drill, not just correctness.
The first round of any drill session is usually a few seconds slower than it needs to be, purely from cold-start jitters — fumbling the interface, re-reading the instructions, adjusting to the format. If you're trying to track a genuine trend, treat round one as a warm-up and let round two be the one that counts.
A single round tells you almost nothing — the number that matters is this week's average speed against last week's. That's the only way to know a drill is actually working rather than just being another thing you did.
Race's setup screen keeps the same difficulty and format every time specifically so that comparison stays honest.