HALT! Stay thy pointy pitchforks and torches of flame!
Mario Kart 8 is one of my favorite games ever, it's fantastic for when I need a short fun break with a relatively fixed length, and it absolutely does require skill to truly be good at it (as was proven when I was a total rookie at it and was utterly destroyed by other webcomic artists online).
That said, even the best player ever can lose first place to a randomly selected item, and anyone who's played it knows it. Particularly the blue shell that can only be avoided if you yourself have the right randomly selected item.