Sorry, but if you are mid-air, would the wheels spinning or not spinning not be just a purely visual effect?
Yes they would.
Ergo, you built your car wrong/did not follow best practices, as if you had, the wheel material would keep on spinning based on the forward velocity of the vehicle.
The engine sound is also something that doesn’t need physics behind it.
And you definitely cannot apply physics from the wheels while mid-air.
So the beheviour to “cut” is 100% correct. The way you create the model(s) must not be.
Note: I’m in no way defending chaos. It’s pure trash. But let’s be objective.
Re: The drifting causing wheels to go mid-air… well, that’s part of why chaos is trash. You can optimize the vehicle to make it happen less, and try to use substep to further correct it at the cost of performance.
However with chaos you are always going to get around 70% less performance over PhysX, and a lot of inaccurate simulations. Probably always, even when they call it fully functioning instead of beta - which I think they are currently since 5.X has basically shipped with only chaos and they made it incrementally harder to go back to physX via source.