So during the Slipstream phase of the tutorial I find that unless you immediately activate it you'll never catch up to the car, and upon re-trying there is no hope of completing the tutorial (the yellow car is just too fast) and you have to restart the entire thing.

I can confirm this. The car in the third section of the tutorial is too fast if you fail the third section and retry. Which means that you have to more or less come out of the second section fine to catch up with the car, or restart the whole tutorial.

Noticed this bug as well.

As far as bugs go, I also had the game crash to desktop when I plugged in a controller after opening the game.

Yes, part three of the tutorial is broken, if you don't master it on your first try (which means you take over the speed of part two).