Hey, that is just EXCELLENT dude!
Well, uhm - If you want to want the game to be really 'known', you should perhaps write Linux compatible code. Initiatives like yours are read by the whole Linux community and being admired. That means the project will get a lot of attention, and coders could help you by offering expertise among other things if you play it right. Linux has a few good games by now (most opengl games work native under Linux), except for racegames.
Excellent example: There is a single guy who makes a (cross-platform) race-sim (it's very alfa/ early beta imho) in his free-time. The game is called Racer (
www.racer.nl ). It's based on Open Dynamics Engine, which is mentioned in another post above. He is only developping the core stuff, and a great community is making high quality cars and tracks for the game (
http://www.racer-xtreme.com/ ).
I don't know anything about Visual Basic / .NET, but you could check out the MONO project (
http://www.go-mono.com/ ), which works cross-platform. SDL (
http://www.libsdl.org/index.php ) for a cross-platform DirectX alike. All open-source and you can use it for free, no charges
Well, to put it in a nutshell: I think a MTM2 alike game pure for Windows will doom the game to stay in the shadows of its successors, who had professional companies with huge man-power (coders) at disposal. On the other hand, a MTM2 alike game for cross-platform (Linux, BSD) will be unique. If the game gets succesfull on these platforms, there is a great chance it will be as well on Windows.
I hope to hear more about it