I hate this game.
The fact that it's a budget title is no excuse for a game to be so undercooked, unbalanced, and frustrating.
This game is (supposedly) an arcade racer, which physics as finicky and unreliable as a spoiled kid from suburbia. Tapping the side of a wall can flip your car onto it's side too easily, making the game aggressively frustrating when you're about to win and an AI driver touches your car just enough to make the physics freak out. Tapping left or right yanks the car to one direction, you have to carefully use a tap-tap strategy because holding left or right for too much quickly can spin you out.
The car list is bitterly "fine", only a few cars stand out as "exclusive content", cars you can't really play as in other games. You can't upgrade your cars and they all mostly feel the same, so there's no reason to be attached to any of them.
Track design is a joke; imagine doodling a looping line on a piece of paper and then directly converting that into a 3D road layout with generic buildings and occasional people scattered here and there. That's what this game's tracks feels like. No alternative paths, no shortcuts, no reason to try anything different each lap. Not a single part of any track holds anything significant or unique from one another.
The main career mode is just a list of championships you must complete in a specific order, you can't pick and choose which events you'd like to try.
Oh yeah, there's powerups in this game, but they couldn't even get them right. You have Blue and Orange powerups; Blue ones are like attributes, like boosting and fixing up your car (you have a health bar in-game), and orange ones are traps, like road spikes and a laser sensor that only works if the section that detects other cars happens to cross through them. You can't use Orange powerups while a Blue powerup is being used, you HAVE to wait for the blue one to be finished before anything else can be used. Games like Snowboard Kids (which is a much better racing game for N64) has the same idea for items but does it better: you have Items and Projectiles being separate types of pickups. You can store 1 of each type, and use them whenever you want.
Items feel like they barely make much of a difference in this game. They also feel very stale and might as well just not even be in the game in the first place.
Rubberbanding is so strong in this game it's easier to stay in 2nd place throughout most of the race and then save up for a boost near the end of the race and hope to god you don't crash at the last second, rather than actually try to use the powerups to your advantage.
I feel like the game overall is such a waste of time, even back when i rented the game as a kid one time it felt like I had so many other things I could've been doing at the moment, and that was during a time when I would sink hours into games that really weren't all that great, like California Speed and 4x4 Evo 2.