Woo Hoo, Baritonomarchette for the win
For anyone else setting this up, follow above advice - set "keyboardprovider" to "dinput" in MAME.ini.
Then go into input this game and change your gears to match these:
This setting works for harddrivc1.zip which is the compact version of harddriv.zip
which you'll need as the parent file. Much appreciate the help