The soundtrack was composed by Takenobu Mitsuyoshi. Mitsuyoshi had no familiarity with stock car racing. He chose to include vocals after hearing "Ridge Racer"'s techno soundtrack and deciding to try a different approach; he recorded his own vocals as the fastest way to get the music into the game. Each course has a corresponding song. "Let's Go Away", the "Daytona" theme, uses a mixture of rock and funk instrumentals, while "Sky High" leaned on Mitsuyoshi's background in jazz fusion. A hidden track, "Pounding Pavement", was inspired by "Hotel California" by the Eagles. For the arcade version, the songs were sampled onto a Yamaha sound chip, including the drums and Mitsuyoshi's voice, then reconstructed by varying when the tracks would play and loop. Mitsuyoshi said this was the only way to include vocals, due to technical limitations of the Model 2. For the Saturn version, the vocals and instruments were rerecorded with real instruments.