I spoke to someone who worked at Namco and was involved in localisation at the time about why this never came across. Summarising what he said, it was a project to keep the remainder of the racing team busy while the rest worked on RR PSP. Apparently it was inspired by GTA3’s success, but those who worked on it had no experience with that sort of game, and GTA wasn’t very popular in Japan, so it ended up being a bit half-assed, and deemed not worthy of bringing West.