As someone who plays as the lightweights for preference reasons, that's good to hear!

It's all about the handling and accelleration. You can have good handling on heavyweights too.

I main Koopa, too :)

I once saw a Villager absolutely dominate a 200cc room.

It was ridiculous.

Dang that there's dedication! Mad respect points for you sir! Unfortunately I sold my soul  at around 6000VR and started using Bowser (at this point due to Mercedes update it was impossible to gain VR unless you win every race so can't completely blame me!) until 9000VR, where I finally stopped caring about VR and went back to using whatever I felt like, namely lightweights! So good that now I can still be competitive while doing so!

That's sort of nice to hear...

I'm no good with 200cc but I like using light characters for Mario Kart 8

If anything, it made anyone else less viable :P

I think lightweights were viable anyway. I was certainly able to race with very respectable results in good rooms with them. Sure, they might be technically inferior but the difference is much smaller than it has been in past games. I've always liked to use Koopa but I won't lie, in MKWii it definitely cost me a lot of races to use him. In MK7 and MK8 Koopa has been far more competitive. The control around corners and of course the acceleration can be really useful in race situations. Also, many players online tend to ignore coins and if you can gather up 10 on your first lap you can end up with a nice top speed for the rest of the race to go with your good acceleration and handling.

It's nice that 200cc perhaps even makes the light characters a superior option, but honestly, I'm likely to stick to 150cc for online racing as I usually just race in Worldwide. Could be useful for those times I do enter 200cc competitions though.

I had an all speed set up with a heavy on the sports bike and it's just not really viable to use on 200cc. It's perfectly manageable on the easy courses but more trouble than it's worth on some of the technical courses.

I've dialed back to medium now with slightly better tires which seems to be alot better balanced. Not as fast on some tracks but better overall.

I was always competitive with lightweights. 200cc has enhanced this, but I'm also finding that heavies can take more shortcuts with less speed reduction (shortcuts are even more central in 200cc). As was stated earlier - the heavies still have the advantage in open tracks, it's the windy, chaotic ones (where the heavies struggled to begin with), that they're being left in the dust.

200cc is great, fun extra, but I think it's obvious why 150cc was was crafted the way that it was initially. 200cc feels more like a drastically sped-up 100cc than 150, but maybe that's just my imagination.

I haven't tried the 200cc yet, but I think it's time to change that. I will start with Yoshi or perhaps Koopa to see the benefits of the lightweights in this class.