The best racing games like OutRun are OutRun 2006: Coast 2 Coast, Horizon Chase 2 and Forza Horizon 5. Below are 9, each with the reason it is here — and, at the end, what filtering to racing costs you.
Filtering to racing means you want the vehicle to be the subject. It is the right filter when what you liked was speed, or handling, or a road worth driving.
What you get: A short session that is complete in itself. A race is over in five minutes and you can always take the corner better.
What made OutRun worth playing in the first place is covered on the full list. This page is the racing part of that answer, and only the racing part.
The best version of the formula, with drifting that finally works.
Made explicitly to be arcade racers of this era again.
If the joy of a beautiful road and a fast car is the whole appeal.
A pixel-art love letter to OutRun and Lotus Turbo Challenge.
Driving as an aesthetic experience rather than a competition.
Low-poly arcade racing with the same clean feel.
For the open-road tone taken somewhere else entirely.
Same era of Sega-adjacent arcade driving, with fighting.
The other great arcade racer about atmosphere over simulation.
Everything outside the vehicle. Racing games rarely have a story, and the ones that try usually should not have.
The full list is on games like OutRun — 9 picks, no genre filter.
OutRun 2006: Coast 2 Coast. The best version of the formula, with drifting that finally works.
No. OutRun released on the Sega Genesis, but a recommendation is only useful if you can play it, so the picks above span platforms and eras. What they share is the genre and the reason.
Simulation models tyre temperature, fuel and weight transfer and punishes you for ignoring them. Arcade gives you grip, boost and a rewind, and is about flow. Buying the wrong one is where most disappointment comes from.
For the simulation picks it changes the game completely. For anything arcade it makes almost no difference.
By hand. Each pick was written for the full OutRun list first, on what the game actually does, and this page is the part of that list that is racing — never a genre tag lookup, which is how "best racing games like Super Mario 64" used to be a page on this site.
Or read the racing guide for where to start in the genre generally.