Which game was this?
Even as the tech lead on the product, I have to agree with the critical commentary in the PSX section of that page. Our company's stock in trade was realism and it hurt us with the mainstream gamers on the PC side, but was even more severely limiting on the console audience. (We also didn't crush it on the execution side on the PSX port.)
Why? Longitudinal measurements are natural for "who's in the lead?" type of questions and all of our track editing tools also worked in lat/long coordinate space.
That would absolutely make sense for a game centered (heh) around racing around a closed track, clever!
(While most NASCAR tracks are ovals and could be represented in polar coordinates fairly naturally, they do have some road courses and the physics and game engine originated in the IndyCar game, which has even more road courses.)
Your coordinate system make sense, and the 3D engine/physics was pretty good for something running on CPU only. (If I remember there was only one or two non-oval tracks)
"I'm Paul Page, from papyrus, this is Indy car racing two"
For reasons unbeknownst to me, my father had that game for the PC. It was one of two games in our household at the time (The other being "Mario Is Missing!" https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mario_Is_Missing!).
I played that quite a bit, but I think I spent most time painting the car, because I wasn't any good at the actual racing.
We would go to NASCAR events, weigh and measure car components, talk to the crews/drivers, and most of us even got the first level of competition license (typically 3 full days of classroom and on-track instruction and then 3-6 more days of individual mostly track time) so we understood what driving a racing car near, at, and slightly over the limit was like.
The PSX product introduced a feature that later made it back to some of our PC titles, called "Arcade Mode". It was still racing (in that skill mattered), but arcade mode gave the cars far better braking, allowed them to slide and pivot more but spin out less (by changing tire slip curves), and gave drag reduction to cars that were losing the race. We also introduced the smoky burnout/donut ability which immediately made it into the PC title (but had a bug that caused a smoky burnout to be the fastest way to launch the car from a standing start, which critics [rightly] hated).
At the end of the day, fairly few people are interested in very realistic racing. (Many of the ex-Papyrus team are over at iRacing now and they're on the ultra-realistic side of things.) If you want to sell a mass-market game, ultra-realism doesn't sell as well as fun and engaging gameplay.
The end state of this drive for realism was https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grand_Prix_Legends which I worked on some of the early code for, but left before it shipped. Even in the early stages, with the best computer and graphics card of the day, a full set of physical controls (including force feedback steering), it was difficult to drive the car around for a single lap at 9/10ths pace, let alone race them in traffic.
I wanted a family and financial security and the game industry wasn’t going to take me where I wanted to go (and I worked on generally successful titles for a successful company; most game devs have it even worse). The Sierra Online acquisition was great; loved meeting and talking about games with Ken and Roberta, but then the subsequent spate of acquisitions just killed a lot of the joy and essence of what made the day-to-day work fun, so that also made it easier to leave.
I went from driving backwards on track to make crashes happen (thanks for not making rules that stopped me from doing that!), to driving faster than anyone else (because my engine was turned up and I turned down the AI), to actually trying to race as my cognitive abilities (and interest in challenge) improved.
Unbenounced to 14 year old me, the matrox millennium had a flat shaded polygon 3d acceleration capability, which made NASCAR run pretty well if you turned textures off. (which is why it was bundled with the card) I kept textures on because I didn't know any better, and the game ran fairly poorly. Ultimately I never played it very much because the framerate was frustratingly low.
Damn shame. It was years later that I found that out. Of course I was terrible at it anyway, so it probably wouldn't have mattered anyway.
Anyway, that's probably why your dad had the game.
Man I spent so many hours playing the PC version (Matrox Millenia era) and the physics engine got me hooked (and the car body editor). Saving replays just to see how multi car crashes would look like (sometimes even self cancelling multi agent collisions)
A time traveling thanks