Just save even more money and do it inside a computer.
Buy Gran Turismo 4 and let your car b-spec some races and revel in the 'safe' driving style that all teams will enforce to ensure they don't lose an expensive car.
The motives of going fast around a circuit in one direction to 'win' are completely opposed to road applications.
This is why I'd rather be driven somewhere briskly by a TrafPol rather than a racing driver. They're polar opposites of the motivation scale.
With GPS, pre-laser scanned courses and a load of engineers, all they'll do is just specify a 'perfect' line and speed, and that'll be about it.
Unless they're limiting the cars to no GPS, and only allowing real-time scanning as environmental inputs, so the car has to figure out where it is, what things around it are, etc etc.
Lets put it this way, if a Robo Race car would be incapable of avoiding an idiot running onto a track because 'it's not programmed to do that' then it's a pointless exhibit of completely missing the point of AI.