The pusher is only accelerating the test vehicles up to a fraction of that, so that they can achieve levitation and after that the vehicle is under its own power.

It wouldn't make for much of a competition if the SpaceX vehicle was the one doing all the work.

Almost no pods have any kind of self propulsion. IIRC the whitepaper states the use of linear accelerators on the tube I-beams to propel the pod. That hasn't been integrated in the competition so the teams just coast at the pusher's 94km/h

The pushers max speed was 80 km/h. The Warr team accelerated past that to hit 94.