I feel you. I lost my dad in 2013. He taught me how to play Super Hang-On on my Sega Genesis, he did the shifting when playing Turbo OutRun in the arcade (until he noticed you can choose auto-shifting), ... so to honor him, I've put him in my games as a mechanic/opponent.
About your game: I played it for a minute. You seem to level up very quickly which breaks the flow. And to be honest: I don't care about points and upgrades. I just want to race and finish before I consider going for the highest score.
You seem to have fallen into the usual perspective trap: scale objects linearly with the distance which looks weird. In reality, objects get exponentially bigger when they get closer. In my first prototype I used sin/cos to mimick this effect.
There are a lot of cars and they really get in your way. Sometimes they are just unavoidable because they completely block the whole road. I believe the most fun comes from navigating the corners. Avoiding obstacles/traffic is secondary. Also, are they moving towards you, instead of racing with you?
The light cone at night looks really silly. x-D But I like the idea of only being able to see the rear lights, although I would've just made the whole car black instead of invisible, except in the light cone.