That sounds exactly like my experience with debugging anything, feeling around the edges and weird output of a problem until you suddenly piece together what's going wrong with it in your mind.
Yeah some radio chatter might add a little bit of flavor to the game for sure. Daytona USA is great and I haven't played Daytona USA 2 that much but it seems fun as well. Have only toyed with it in emulation, where it's kind of a broken mess. I really wish Sega would rerelease that. Or make a racing compilation with Outrun, Turbo Outrun, Outrunners and Outrun 2 on it. But I think they lost the Ferrari license which complicates things.
Daytona and Virtua Racing kinda make me want to make a low res polygon racer too haha. But there are a couple of those out there already.