Virtua Racing was released in the dawn of the 3D era, and it stands out among its peers because the designers understood perfectly how to utilize the new technology and what its limitations were at the time. Where Virtua Fighter and similar games took us from an era of beautifully drawn, colorful and highly detailed 2D sprites to an ugly world of heavily polygonal, crude representations of people and creatures that moved in unnatural, sluggish ways, Virtua Racing's designers understood that the best use for 3D at the time was the visceral thrill of simulating motion in a way 2D never could. Until Virtua Racing, racing games were either top-down pixel-driven games, or crudely-simulated "3D" that used the same endless track illusion and a succession of increasingly larger sprites to create the appearance that objects were getting closer.
Virtua Racing gave us tracks that felt real, with tire marks, tight curves and vehicles that moved like their real world counterparts. And while it may look simple now, when the game hit arcades in the early 90s, there was nothing like the world it presented to us, with forests, ferris wheels, mountains, bridges and ocean under blue skies.
If you were fortunate enough to experience the late arcade era, before increasingly powerful consoles rendered cabinet technology obsolete in many respects, Virtua Racing has a fond place in your memories next to quarter-eaters like NBA Jam, Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, Mortal Kombat and Street Fighter II.
Virtua Racing is exactly the sort of game that should be preserved by GOG, not only for its historical importance, but also because it's still a blast to play. I believe the SEGA Ages version is the most complete and most intuitive to preserve for modern systems, and should be the version that is safeguarded for history.