Given my Autoduel Champions remark earlier - I'll fan boy right along with you, but Car Wars is WAY too fidgety for play by post. Would that it were not so...
Gaslands might work, but it's so reliant on templates that it starts a whole bunch of different headaches. D20 isn't awful but it does lack the innate Chase rules built into Savage Worlds that would handle the race part extremely well. (Not as well as Cars Wars, but impulsed movement, drifts, acceleration, hazard levels... yeah, that's going to need a VTT or VASSAL - and Car Wars has been ported to VASSAL)
On the topic of the fiction: I'd lean against investing a lot of time in the prep of the cars and teams - that's almost always handled in vignettes for a reason. There are the occasional moments when we need to see something, a ram plate, pop-up bullet screen or whatever so that when we see it in the film we're not like, "
Blueberries! Where'd that come from?!" In actual play, I doubt that's going to be very much fun. The rules and a GM who arbitrates thing keeps the incredulity out of the mix.
Maybe the morning of the race as the teams get up, get prepped for the day, check on their cars with (I would suggest NPC) mechanics.
Have the car be part of the character sheet. Maybe something easy like:
40 points to divide in:
Top End
Acceleration
Handling
Armor
Weapons
Might need to add some kind of quick armory that describes how many Weapon points each kind of weapon uses up, but you could be up and running pretty quickly.
Roll+Stat to decide head-to-head challenges of speed and power, roll to hit (with mods for driving skill etc) for weapons.
That's what I can come up with at midnight after a few minute thought, anyway.
This message was last edited by a moderator, as it was against the ToU, at 04:57, Sat 20 Oct 2018.