I remember playing "Ignition" quite a few years back and back than this game was pretty adictive. Not so much from the multitude of tracks or vehicles (though it does okay in that department), but from the multiplayer, when me and my friends tended to race against each other before the monitor between some "heavier" multiplayer games like Worms or Heroes.
Lets start with the basics - as game description tells you, the game has 7 tracks: farms, snowy mountains, cliffs at the coast, metropolis (I believe it's specifically designated as Tokyo), South-American ruins, vulcanic "wasteland" and wild west style desert. Additionally, upon completing a single player mode, each of these tracks can be raced in reverse (mirror league; a feature that was popular at the time the game was developed), which helps a bit with its replay value.
Each track has its own little surprises - there are shortcuts that allows you to get ahead (sometimes hiddens, sometimes in the form where you choose which turn you take) and every race has at least two of those. Aside from that there are other traps that await the racers - falling rocks that flatten your cars (and, once you're "compacted", your controls work in reverse for a while), trains that go right through the track or cliffs that you need to jump over using your car's nitro to name just those most common. Generally each track is quite different from another and they look very nice (taking into account the graphics of its time).
Another, string point are the vehicles, not all of them accessible from the start - they're wacky (school bus, a police car, monster truck, medical jeep to name just a few) and truly different, each having statistics different from others. A truck ("Smokey") for example doesn't have speed, but it certainly sticks to the road, the yellow car ("Banana") has good acceleration, while the black sports car ("Vegas") is quick, but certainly can easily fall off its course. Each car also has nitro that is slowly recharging itself. At any time you can punch it to give your vehicle an extra boost (often adviced when jumping over cliffs), but you should use it wisely. A bonus is that ANY of these vehicles is as good as the others in the right hands (this was tested by me and my friends) - even the slow ones can out-race the speedsters, if you handling them right.
The multiplayer is probably the game's greatest strength - it allows for two players to go at it on the same PC via split-screen. I know that in the times of 4-player games this may seem like nothing, but as far as "hot seat" racing games go, "Ignition" does fairly well and it certainly kept me and my friends occupied longer than most other titles from its genre.
Overall, if you like arcade racing with a twist (like Micro Machines or more recent Toybox Turbos), I think you'll enjoy "Ignition". It's NOT the best game of the genre, but it certainly does everything right and should entertain you, if only as a quick break between other games.