One character in the game is named Snake Sanders. The name is a reference to classic hard rock band Whitesnake. The character also resembles Whitesnake singer David Coverdale.
A character in the game is called Jake Badlands. This is a reference to guitarist Jake E. Lee, who played in the hard rock band Badlands.
Olaf the Stout is one of the main characters in The Lost Vikings, another game developed by Silicon & Synapse (now Blizzard) and published by Interplay. He makes a cameo appearance In Rock N' Roll Racing as a secret character that has a +1 ability improvement and no weakness on all four skills (Acceleration, Top Speed, Cornering and Jumping). Of course, because of this he is unbalanced with the other characters, so using him is sort of "cheating".
To play as Olaf, first navigate to Tarquinn. Hold L Button+R Button+Select Button before pressing Right Dpad. The GBA version uses the same code.
The game was originally made as the sequel to RPM Racing (Radical Psycho Machine Racing) for SNES and its working title was RPM 2. However, the developers eventually decided to add the rock soundtrack and change the title to turn it into a new I.P.