I don't know whether racing drivers are bad drivers when on the normal streets. It wouldn't particularly surprise me if they were.
The kind of game that I think is most likely to cause problems isn't the one that's simulating Formula-1 style racing or rally driving. I saw a game once (I don't know what it was called, but I expect it's a whole genre) where the players were choosing normal-people cars and racing through normal-people streets, with an emphasis on realism.
That's when I thought « If the people complaining about video games damaging people's brains were serious, they should be concerned about this much more than pretend warfare. ».
There are a couple that come to mind that satisfy that criteria; Midnight Club and its sequels, or the (admittedly not at all focussed on realism) Burnout series, both are/were fairly mainstream during their time and featured racing through fictional city streets. So did the Need For Speed: Wanted games, I believe. I assume there are plenty of others that I just didn't play or don't remember (Grid, perhaps?); there's never been a shortage of games that feature driving environments and ways that would be suicidal in real life, even if you ignore the obvious absurdity of games like F-Zero or Extreme-G (Or Mario Kart :))
Anecdata: I'll admit to having the experience of, after playing Burnout: Revenge for many hours, continuing to view streets and traffic on my way to work through the lens of traffic-checking and drifting for extra points/boost. I hasten to add that I never felt the urge to -act- on that view; so much of driving is subconscious and/or automatic that I suspect we have something of a built-in buffer working in favor of normalcy here. But it was pretty surreal.
The kind of game that I think is most likely to cause problems isn't the one that's simulating Formula-1 style racing or rally driving. I saw a game once (I don't know what it was called, but I expect it's a whole genre) where the players were choosing normal-people cars and racing through normal-people streets, with an emphasis on realism.
That's when I thought « If the people complaining about video games damaging people's brains were serious, they should be concerned about this much more than pretend warfare. ».