I believe tying it in with minor/major factions would be a fantastic motivator to get people to play a different side of elite. There's already lore about ship races, but I've never found any sort of inclusion into the game whatsoever of this.
I would like to add, SRV races would be amazing, in a point to point style so they wouldn't necessarily have to flesh out actual tracks with obstacles.
My intention behind some of these added ideas is to keep it simple, to allow a foundation that brings much more life to the styles of the game without making it something that takes 3 years for them to implement.
If you're interested in racing, of all kinds, there's actually a fair amount of player-driven activity on that front.
Buckyball Racing Club is very active, regularly hosting a decent variety of event types: what they have in common is being timed point-to-point rather than head-to-head. The
Yggdrasil race just finished up, but you can expect something else to show up hot on its heels. Sometimes it's racing across the bubble, sometimes it's an SRV dash from base to base (or from base to alien wreck and back to base,
one of my favorites), sometimes a crazy combo of both.
BRC is also hosting a longer-form Road Rally Racing event, which is pretty cool and lets you drive an SRV around / through bases on high-G worlds.
See here for more!
EliteRacers is a tad less active than they used to be, but they've done a bunch of cool events as well. An active one you can do right now is the
Okinura Station Sprint Challenge.
So while there's no in-game-engine support, there's a pretty solid racing community and a steady feed of events. In-game support would be
awesome, but there's still a lot of fun to be had without it!