I don't think that Taito game is as impressive. They just don't understand how speed works and their hills are pathetic. The tunnel starts approaching at supersonic speed. But then it slows down for a bit until you are inside the tunnel. Oh, and once you're inside the tunnel the lights on the side are at the wrong place in the distance because the developers don't understand proper perspective, either. They come from above where the ceiling should be to almost down to the car's level. Things on the side of the road move way too fast, likely because they have very few steps of animation.
Everything you've nitpicked (except the last split second of tunnel entry) is more arcade faithfulness than anything else. The game still looks nice overall and does some cool things like different terrain on either side, cliffs, multiple roads, and it fills the roads with sprites (multiple large vehicles and lots of obstacles), has jumps, helicopters (one fire missiles at you), bullets, fire, sparks and thruster effects, etc. All with some very nice coloring.
Road Rash, on the other hand, has stuff all over on the sides of the roads. Not just right next to the edge of the road. The move in proportion to your speed, meaning they don't zip from the horizon to where you are in a single second. Things further away should be moving more slowly and Road Rash does this. The hills in Road Rash are far more impressive and factor into the gameplay (limited viability, etc). All of the sprites have software scaling applied to them instead of being animated in course steps. You can investigate this yourself if you get knocked off your bike and run around slowly. It's just too bad the game has awful colors.
Road Rash does start objects off far back and the scaling is impressive on a technical level. But if we're judging console racers strictly on tech, then every Mode 7 racer absolutely destroys all PCE and Genesis racers except Virtua Racing. Aside from being an ugly game, Road Rash usually has empty roads. S.S.I. often has up to 4 large vehicles, 4 bullets, the arrow and misc effects or objects all over the road plus rain across the screen at times. So it doesn't fill the side of the road, where zero gameplay takes place, with sprites. Maybe it's because the overall 3D effect of Road Rash is more realistic than typical "Rad Racer" style games, but it feels too choppy and sluggish. The Sega Master System runs Road Rash pretty much the same as the Genesis, only with a bit less sprites and a bit less parallax. It's too bad that the visuals in Road Rash are so bland and fugly. It would have been nice to see the engine used for a regular racer with nice art and color, with the sprites reduced enough for a smoother framerate or just top speeds to match the framerate. Whatever it would take to make it feel smooth.
If you guys want to see lots of large road side objects, hills, properly splitting forks in the road and all kinds of stuff, check out Outrun Europa for SMS. You even get to ride around on a bike and punch people. 
Anyway, Victory Run came out a year before the Mega Drive and around 4.5 years before Top Gear and does everything Top Gear does, other than tunnels (see S.C.I. and Chase H.Q.) and having a split screen, which other games make appear to not be taxing when it's a horizontal split like that. You have large rolling hills, even with the road curving through them and several large vehicles on the road at a time (each of which feature different angles of animation that scales along the way). It even has a 3D rolling cloud layer in one stage, another with desert on one side of the road and a body of water on the other with an animated shoreline and waves, off-road courses, where the road has a 3D textured shape to it, plus large skid clouds and obstacles. Not to mention the color of everything changing as it gets later during single races. Top Gear doesn't change anything over time and on stages with a sunset in the sky, the course and cars look the same as on a blue sky race. Top Gear is designed to quickly thin out the vehicles at the beginning of the race and has simpler Outrun Europa style hills which conceal sprites. Otherwise it just takes the more constant on-road sprites of Victory Run and puts them on the side of the road, but is only doing what a PC Engine game did (minus the things from Victory Run which it doesn't do) an entire console generation of time earlier.
Well, in Top Gear the vehicle pack does quickly thin out, but when they bunch up together on the track, you see that the game CAN put all of the cars in the field on screen at any time. It's not one of those games which only allows two or three cars on screen, like I think Victory Run among many others are; it can put a lot more cars on screen than that.
Also, while I actually like the first game best gameplay-wise, Top Gear 2 and Top Gear 3000 each in turn improve the graphics over the first game. They do all have that "Pole Position/Rad Racer" visual style, but it's a very nice looking version of it. The first Top Gear's definitely one of my favorite games in the "Pole Position style" racing subgenre.
Could the TG16/CD do it? Well... at least in part, sure, it probably could, with less color variety and probably some missing effects. It'd have been interesting to see, for sure, because racing games are definitely one of the system's weaker genres. The system has some solid topdown racers, but behind-the-car? There are very few, on CD or card. Victory Run and Outrun are two of the best ones, and they hold up to anything on the Genesis from their time for sure, but what was there for later ones? Sadly Hudson wasted its fantastic start (Victory Run is a great game, and very good looking too!) by never making another racing game again as far as I can remember, and Outrun and Power Drift were about it for good-looking behind-the-car racers, too. Sorry, stuff like Racing Damashii, Final Lap Twin, or F-1 Triple Battle aren't exactly anywhere near Top Gear. As for Road Spirits, that game has very nice graphics, but they forgot to provide any semblance of a challenge, which kind of ruins it. I like the game, but it's almost impossible to ever lose a race. It'd have benefited if, instead of doing "Outrun but you'll never run out of time", they'd had opponents to race against, Top Gear-style. Time-trial racing is fun and I love Outrun, but I really like races against other actual cars on the track. That's one reason why I think Top Gear was nicely improved over Lotus (Gremlin's previous racing game), that one uses Outrun's time-trial style, while Top Gear goes to a "race against other cars" design.
Anyway, beyond Road Spirits, are there any behind-the-car CD racing games of any note? There's Zero 4 Champ II's racing parts also, I guess... how does that compare to the SNES games in the franchise, visually? Gameplay-wise none look interesting (drag racing isn't something which interests me much, unless this one actually has turns?), though, but that's just me.
So yeah, part of the problem on TG16/PCE is that the racing genre thinned out badly after the early years of the system's life, something which didn't happen on SNES or Genesis. If the people who had made Victory Run had kept making racing games, maybe there could have been a Super or Arcade CD racing game with quite impressive visuals, for example... it's too bad it didn't happen. As is, I think that the TG16 lags badly compared to the SNES and Genesis in racing games, overall. I like a few games on the system (TG16 Outrun blows away the Genesis version in playability, for example!), but there isn't enough depth in the library. There are only six or seven racing games on the PCE/Turbo CD overall, and the only behind-the-car ones are Zero 4 Champ II and Road Spirits... and Zero 4 Champ II is as much adventure game as it is racing. Even though the TG16 of course can't do as many colors or visual effects as the SNES (that is, matching Top Gear 2 would have been hard; look at how the Genesis version of the game pales badly compared to the SNES original), the system surely could have done a lot better at racing games than what it did had the genre not died out on the platform, and had there been further first-party efforts at them as well. It'd be interesting to see what the system could do when pushed. I doubt that any of the games that were released do that, for Super/Arcade CD possibilities particularly.
Another game that it'd have been very interesting to see the TG16 attempt something like is Outrun 2019. The first Genesis Outrun looks great but plays poorly (it's so choppy!), but 2019 has both great graphics and great gameplay. And it's got cool effects like transparent roads, split roads, multi-level roads, jump pads, etc. too. Very impressive game; that and Top Gear are my top two "Pole Position style" racing games.
MicroMachines on NES trumps all.
Believe it or not, the MicroMachines on CDi is pretty good.
I almost believed that such a thing could exist. But not even my favorite folks at Camerica would have wasted time on CD-i.
I say this without any attempt at research.
Micro Machines was ported to many platforms, and yes, the CD-i was one of them.
