I'm thinking about upgrading my internet connection and I have different options. Some of them give me very high download rates and less upload rates. Choosing others I will have not very high - although good - download rates but great upload rates.

I ask your opinion about what option would allow me to have better pings in the game. Also, what does that number above cars, that appear when I press shift+f8, mean exactly?

Thank you in advance.

so long as your upload is above 128kbs it shouldnt be affecting your pings. But then again it depends if you share a connection.

Upload/download rates and pings are not related. You can have 30ms pings with a 56k modem and you can have 400ms pings with a 100mbit line. Depends on the quality of the ISP's network.

It's probably your best bet to ask around among your friends or other people in your area. The usual causes for poor pings are ISP's overselling their capacity (like putting 10,000 DSL customers in a certain area on one shared 100mbit line and hoping they don't get online at the same time), poor network quality in general or if their peering is bad. If you want to play on servers hosted in the US and Europe for example, you would need an ISP that has good connections to the rest of the world.

If you want to host LFS games high upload is more important.
The higher your upload rate is the more cars can race on your host.

Thanks for the answers.