A racing chart is any chart where the shape you'd normally draw once instead plays out over time, with the ranking inside it visibly changing as it goes. The bar chart race template popularized the format (bars for a handful of companies or countries grow and swap vertical position as the years tick by), and the same idea has since spread to other shapes. Line races draw each series growing left to right instead of static end to end. Column races run the same motion vertically. Pie races reshuffle slice sizes around a circle. Swarm plots let points drift and cluster as a distribution shifts. All five templates here answer the same underlying question: who's ahead, and when did the lead change hands. They just draw the answer differently.
What makes any of these worth watching is overtakes, not just growth. A dataset where every entity climbs at roughly the same rate produces a race where nothing passes anything: the bars just get longer in the same order, which is a chart animating for no reason. The versions that actually get shared are the ones where the ranking visibly flips: a challenger closes a gap and takes the lead, or a former leader gets passed by two or three rivals in quick succession. That needs both enough entities to make jockeying possible (four to ten is the usual range) and enough time steps for the motion to read as gradual rather than a jump-cut.
This page exists to route you to the right one of the five rather than re-explain each in full. Each template linked below has its own page covering its exact data shape, its export settings and where it works best.