Hi Txcoastal1 ...

Sorry to hear that your machine is having problems. Please file a service request ticket at <https://www.american-pinball.com/support/service/>, and our awesome support team will get you fixed up ASAP! Thank you.

While the ball is held in the track VUK, it's kind of a mini bonus round: all jackpots stay lit so you can more easily milk them for a few seconds... and/or collect a Triple Super Jackpot on the kicker shot (which will immediately release the ball in the VUK)... and/or try to add a ball via the car targets.

You can adjust how long the ball waits in the VUK via Settings > Hot Wheels > Track Multiball Mega Jackpot Time.

Congrats on joining the club, Pizzaman13 ! I hope you love the game.

Keeping your RPMs high is the key to big scores on Hot Wheels. A secondary key is lighting and using Boost at the right time. Maxing your RPMs gets you to Red Line Mania and permanently shifts gears for higher Tach values... but it's harder to keep RPMs up in higher gears, so there's some debate about the sweet spot for gears to maximize scoring. IMHO 3rd Gear is probably the most lucrative long term.

Standard "modern game strategy" of starting a Battle mode and then stacking a multiball works well here. The only two multiballs that can run simultaneously are Loop Crash and Victory Laps, and only if you start them together... this pairing can certainly be lucrative. And EPIC can stack on anything at any time, but it's much more valuable if you start several (preferably all 5, but that's asking a lot) Epic Features simultaneously.

Hope these tips get ya going... have fun!