Love this game myself, play it quite a bit on my sitdown cab, you can switch the game to English if you enter the service menu with F1 (or F2/F3, I always forget which one).
Thanks for the information on the language setting, I'll take a look next time I'm on. The 'check point' music is a little broken in MAME, is this normal?
I'll be using the gears next time to give 330 Km/h, which makes quite a difference.
Feel on fire tonight. Only one lap let me down - all others below 49 seconds (except from the starting grid). Course is expert on default settings - manual gears.