Now I know you said you don’t like realistic racing sims, but have you tried BeamNG? Although the physics and stuff are realistic it’s a game that doesn’t take itself too seriously so there’s a lot of wacky arcadey stuff to do in it.

initial d stage 8 arcade and others initial d games with teknoparrot. There are a lot of other arcade racing games you can run on teknoparrot like sega rally, daytona, wangan midnight, outrun, H2Overdrive, grid, sega race tv, mario kart, etc The roms for them are available on archive.org including a torrent with a huuuge amount of other arcade games. Teknoparrot also supports racing wheels but I think you need to patch(available on github for individual games) the forcefeedback(old logitech wheels work great from what I have heard and it might not be hard to find a used one for real cheap)

Edit: I found that they are charging a subscription for some stuff now although it should still mostly work but if you want the open source version. You can get openparrot here but it hasn’t been updated since 2019 :( I have used the closed source official version in the past and it worked well since I didn’t have a better alternative. In their early days, they had some sort of invasive copyright protection which people called a spyware.

Rock n’ Roll Racing, a sci-fi themed SNES racer in which you use prize money to buy vehicles upgrades like better engines, armor, guns, and mines. Soundtrack includes chiptune renditions of songs by bands such as Black Sabbath and Deep Purple.

If motorcycles are your jam then there’s Road Redemption on Steam. It’s like Mario Kart but much more brutal, with guns, swords (and decapitations), and blunt weapons (to knock helmets off to pave way for decapitations).

Edit: forgot to mention, the game display artwork shows a cop about to get nailed with a nailbat. Also I think you get extra points for getting cops. Just saying.

Garfield Kart is the only racing game series I need.

MotorStorm: Pacific Rift is my favorite arcade racer of all time on the PS3.

Has something like 9 classes of vehicles from motorcycles to big rigs and the various regiojs of tracks are all bangers.

It does require either a PS3 or a pretty strong CPU (7700x or better recommended) to emulate.

I was surprised how much I enjoyed that Star Wars Pod Racing game when it came out.

Crash Team Racing is goated, as is Diddy Kong Racing

grip: combat racing is fun. I also have enjoyed various need for speed games. NFS Heat and NFS Rivals were both fun.

You should definitely try Blur which was 360 and PS3.

I miss Burnout 3. That’s the only racing game that I’ve ever wanted to play more than once, and it’s the only one I’ve ever recommended to anyone else.

distance

tldr: at least as much 4 player split-screen fun as mario kart, but tends to run on most potatoes and is 6€. visually stunning, challenging, very enjoyable.

i was sceptical at first, but it’s right up there with mario kart (and for me wrc) as great single and multiplayer fun. i really love it for how bonkers it feels sometimes. it’s not as resource heavy as many other modern titles, has a great linux native version and tends to be fascinating to look at too. what confused and made me struggle at first is that you need to create multiple (offline in-game) profiles, one for each user in your split screen race (up to four ppl). so, if your controller needs some settings to be changed, you need to change it within the profile you’re using for your race. this is really cool as that way each player can have their own custom setup, but it really confused me at first…

Split Second is a cool hidden gem that has tons of map destruction and changes the course up each lap.

You are my kinda person. Love my arcadey racers like what you’ve mentioned

Would recommend Vigilante 8 2nd Offense for an underrated car combat game. I played the PS1 version but I’m sure any platform is good for it

Flatout. Kinda like a rally racing version of burnout. Same devs i think. Crazy taxi games are classic. Red out probably the fastest racing game ever.