So, I got the MAME FFB up and running today, great work as always Boomslang, thanks!
Let me just share a handy little tip to anyone setting this up for the first time, to save them a fruitless hour and a bit of head scratching and wondering why it's not working - make sure your mame.ini file has actually saved as an ini file. When I was getting everything set up initially the text file I was putting the info into saved itself as a text file called mame.ini... FFS. I eventually twigged what the problem was when I realised it didn't have the cog thing in the icon.
Because this took a bit of finagling to get working in the end, I'm not sure whether I ended up using your Windows 7 Test plugin or the regular MAME 64 bit one, but Virtua Racing, Outrunners and Outrun all work OK. Super Chase Criminal Termination hangs for me though at the 'press any key to continue' screen, which is odd, because I definitely had it working earlier and I'm sure on that early test go the FFB was working.
Also, if anyone's struggling to get their old Virtua Racing ROM working in the latest version MAME make sure you have a file called model1io.zip file and m1comm.zip in your ROMs folder. I was still missing one last EPROM - epr-15624.17 but I was able to find it in an old Virtua Formula zipped file I had. Extracted it, added to my VR.zip and game is now working