Impressive! Well I like the direction it's going in. The theme reminds me of a really fun arcade style racer my wife and I used to play. It was called "Gas Guzzlers - Car Carnage". Used to be on Steam. Not sure if it's still around.
Looks like it's still there, looks pretty cool. While it's a driving game, oddly enough I would say my inspirations right now are largely the modern run based card games or games adjacent to that: Slay the Spire, Monster Train, Peggle, FTL, Power Chord, etc. I thought "Why not combine one of those with Mario Kart?"
The visual style and visual theme is mostly me leaning into what I think the Genesis is good at, plus what I can get done myself. I can't do sprite art, so I figure why not pre-render a lot of the content?