''apart from switching it on, thinking "oh god this is hard" and then switching it off again''

I had a similar reaction, but this past January I started playing it for more than ten minutes before giving up again the way I had in the past, and began to get used it a bit. And began to love it. Then there was a long gap where I played nothing till I read the NTSC Karbonis V challenge thread again and tried to improve my Feisar times [love that ship even though it's slow]. The original is a great game. Now if only I could retry a race immediately after completing it. It makes you reload the track again even though it's already in the console RAM.