Well maybe I'm missing something in the settings or something, but the game appears to be racing for me.
Since the sound is fixed I thought I would give it another go... the sound DOES make a difference btw, it isn't quite as boring. Anyway I try one of the last courses in the selection menu, this Cliffside course. I think "this will be fun I'll have to keep from driving off the edge, maybe I can knock other people off, ect". WRONG. There are little guides on the side of the cliff, making it impossible to fall off even though the laws of physics would be to differ. I can't pass the cars at all because it's a one lane road all the way down and every time I aim to pick up speed this weird auto-brake icon comes up and it slams on the breaks. And the course was so long and so slow paced (even the speedo on the car never made it higher than 80mph) that I exited out before I finished.
Ok so like you said, drifting is awkward on this one, I can't control my speed, I can't wreck other cars and I can't even wreck myself. Why am I playing this again?
I feel like I'm missing something in the translation..... literally. Maybe some of the settings written in Japanese at the selection screen would make things better? Do we know anyone with some knowledge of Kanji? I looked at the game data and all the 2d sprites are just png files. If we knew what they said then we could quickly make a translated set.