If your times tables were memorised in school and never used since, they don't disappear — they just get slow to recall. A few short sessions bring the automatic recall back faster than most people expect.
Chanting "7 times 8 is 56" on a loop is how most of us first learned it, but it's not the fastest way to rebuild it as an adult. Answering it cold, under a small time limit, and getting instant feedback on whether you were right builds faster recall than passive repetition.
That's the whole mechanic behind Race: a clock, a question, instant right-or-wrong — closer to how the fact needs to fire in real life.
Almost everyone has a handful of facts that never fully automated — often the 7s, 8s and 9s. Amateur and Pro levels weight toward exactly this range (up to 12, then up to 15), so they surface the gaps school levels often smoothed over.
Once those specific facts stop being a pause, the rest of the table usually already feels solid.
If 7 × 8 = 56 is solid, then 56 ÷ 7 = 8 and 56 ÷ 8 = 7 are already half-learned — division practice is mostly just running the same facts backward. That's one reason division often feels harder than it should: it's not a separate skill from multiplication, it's the same recall being asked for in the direction you practised less.