Besides being an amazingly faithful adaptation of the ground-breaking arcade game, the very first home version of Virtua Racing was the first, and only, Sega Genesis game to feature the SVP, or Sega Virtua Processor.
Besides being the key element that allowed blazingly fast three dimensional polygons to be produced on a system that was clearly not originally designed to do so, the SVP chip was also Sega's answer to Nintendo's Super FX chip, which had been introduced on the Super NES to produce similar results. There are conflicting reports regarding which chip is better performance wise, but one fact still remains irrefutable: the SVP was definitely more expensive than the Super FX.
Virtua Racing was introduced to the American public at the retail price of $100, which led to less than impressive sales. Afterwards, Sega planned on introducing a separate "modular" cart which would house only the SVP, with additional games utilizing the chip introduced at competitive prices. The plan was scrapped, though the idea later lived on to a certain degree with the 32X.