I did gameplay on the game once before, but that was when I was playing it via EmuVR. I decided to play it on standalone MAME this time.
As emulation of the game still chugs in places, I had to do a complete recording of my single play session where I played all four courses, then played my recording back and wrote it to a huge AVI file, which I converted and also cropped because of top black and bottom gray bars during the recording, into an MP4 file via ffmpeg. Thankfully, the game (or emulation rather) didn't crash during my entire play session, thanks to the current version of MAME that eliminated this issue, whereas on the previous builds, including the one still used in the MAME core for RetroArch, it used to crash a lot, especially on videos of MAME emulation of the game posted by others before me who did experience crashes. But not here.
I play the normal courses with the so-called "Premium" cars (A Ferrari-looking car, the BMW M5 which I used in my play on the game on the MAME core of RetroArch via EmuVR, and an Aston Martin Project Vantage), selectable by pushing down on the brake on the Car Select screen, whereas with the Winding Tōge course, I played it with of course everyone's favorite Tōfu delivery car, the AE86 Trueno, or the Sprinter Trueno or Corolla Levin, depending on where you live. The version being played is the default Twin cabinet US version with the U/D shifter, but no handbrake (Is there a way to enable the handbrake, like how I was able to in the European version of Thrill Drive?), not the deluxe cabinet version with the H-Shifter, handbrake and clutch which Vectrex4Life, as you know in his videos on the game that you may have seen, is currently in possession of the PCB set for said version and intends to contribute a ROM dump of it to MAME as that version is still currently undumped and unplayable in MAME.
If Vectrex4Life has successfully made a ROM dump of the deluxe cabinet version and contributed it to MAME, and if emulation on the game has steadily improved, I will revisit the game by playing the deluxe cabinet version and using the Logitech G29 steering wheel that I have and the gear-shifter add-on for it, which I intend to play Thrill Drive with in the future.
Sorry for the poor performance on the Winding course. I still need to practice on that one. I guess the lack of the handbrake in the version that I played really prevented me from doing the course well. Even the version of Racing Jam playable in MAME is also lacking the handbrake with the exception of the non-working Deluxe version.
EDIT: A new version of MAME just added versions GM and GN which include handbrake, H-Shifter and Clutch functionalities that are not present in this version which is GQ.
Even though, as said before, Vectrex4Life may have told you that you cannot play this nor the predecessor in MAME, you can now, thanks to the efforts of all the well-seasoned MAME developers out there who were and still are hard at work to get games like this working in all sorts of ways. The rear-view mirror however still doesn't work as it should, the course layouts and cars previewed in the respective select and pre-race screens are still covered up by black and gray rectangles and the music is still inaccurate. But, as MAME keeps evolving and changing, and with emulation improving with a newer version of MAME that gets released, these issues would be ironed out one day to make emulation of this game as perfect as playing it on original hardware.
As much as how Vectrex4Life was happy when he was able to play both Racing Jams for himself when he did videos on both, I was happy myself to play it, thanks to MAME. I never saw the original machines of either game when I was younger, which was why I never heard of them until I saw his videos on them. And even if I did, they most likely would have been at some arcade that I would have stumbled across which would have been part of a mini-casino that would have been off-limits to children and minors like how I would have been, as was the case when I discovered the other Konami racer called Winding Heat as a teenager and never had the chance to play because it was at an arcade that I was not allowed to enter as a minor. The lack of [proper] MAME emulation and the fact that both games and Thrill Drive, all running on either the Cobra, Hornet or the NWK-TR hardware, were all fitted with the infamous RTC chip known by Vectrex4Life as the "Suicide Battery" weren't the only reasons why most people have never heard of the games given that they were massive flops upon their respective releases despite their incredible ambitions and impressive feats. I think Konami were really underdogs when it comes to making 3D arcade racing games, when they are (or at least were) usually often craved for their big hits like Metal Gear Solid, Silent Hill, Castlevania SOTN, DDR and ISS Pro (later Pro Evolution Soccer).