Sorry if this has already been discussed or if it's not the right place to discuss this, I'm kind of new here. Anyway, in a way that's easy for beginners to understand, how do you write a basic racing game?

1) Download Unity Engine

2) Locate a Car Physics Tutorial:

http://forum.unity3d.com/threads/basic-to-advanced-car-or-vehicle-tutorial.86703/

http://docs.unity3d.com/Manual/WheelColliderTutorial.html

http://forum.unity3d.com/threads/car-tutorial.47154/

3) Follow the tutorial, and try out things along the way

Of course, this is just one way of learning, and just one engine. You could try the same for the Unreal Engine, though I personally find Unity easier to get into for beginners.

Secondly, most of the tuts you will find just tell you how to setup the physics for a car.... if you complete that, you are already halfway there. There are other important topics later, the racing system itself, adding the additional cars and optimising the game to not overload the system (both because of graphics and physics). Improving the basic race track so it starts to lock interesting, and again optimising it so it doesn't uses to much resources.

But these are advanced topics, best left out for now.

You could also go a way simpler 2d route without an engine, but I don't know of any good tutorial for that. And of course, that might be even heavier on coding, don't know if you like this more or not.

Of course, this is just one way of learning, and just one engine. You could try the same for the Unreal Engine, though I personally find Unity easier to get into for beginners.
Secondly, most of the tuts you will find just tell you how to setup the physics for a car.... if you complete that, you are already halfway there.

I'd say you aren't half way there. You've barely got past a "Hello World". Most engines nowadays even have a car physics starter sample that comes with the engine but, this in no way represents a "Racing game".

The key to a racing game is defining the track and the AI to get the cars to follow the track, overtake, undertake, return to the track if they are knocked off, rubber banding or some other system so that the player can catch up if they are knocked off the track.
In fact you don't even need a 3D engine or a physics engine (it could be 2D top down) to actually write a Racing game but, what you do need is to get the "Racing" logic sorted.

In my opinion, you should learn about unity, if you have knowledge of C #, the first work in Unity simple game is not too difficult! Good luck