Speed Pickup

See whether this would work for you:

  • an actor with a sphere collider acting as a speed boost

  • below, our ball pawn also has a similar collider
  • when the ball detects the boost, we check our current velocity
  • use it as direction and multiply it by the desired value to add a physical impulse

Image from Gyazo

Seems to work pretty well for what it is, but there must be a dozen or so ways to implement similar behaviour.