So happy the game is finally here! Do you think it will be possible to mod it a bit? For example will it be complicate to add the two secrets pilots Jinn Reeso and Cy Yunga of the N64 version, and also improve the IA?

You can change IA difficulty in trial mode, didn't knew thoses characters, crazy...

I hope this gets mods eventually. While the actual gameplay has aged well, it could use some better characters models in the menus.

The main menu and before races menu interface are exposed as ".tga" image files in "STAR WARS Racer\data\images". You can for example switch the name of "GREYEDSPLASH.TGA" and "splash.TGA" to get the N64 main menu background image. I tried it and it works.

However, the HUD in races doesn't seem to be in those files. It's probably in the ".bin" files that are inside "STAR WARS Racer\data\lev01":

out_modelblock.bin
out_splineblock.bin
out_spriteblock.bin
out_textureblock.bin

I've tried replacing the background image with a 1920x1440 ".tga" image, and the result isn't good. It isn't centered, and it's cut in the middle in a strange way. I don't know if Special K will detect and be able to replace this kind of textures.

Check out the OpenSWE1R project.
I've started the project last year and we create an open-source version of the games code.
We also analyze how the internals and file formats work.

We already have tools to work with various file formats, including models / textures, sprites, splines and savegames.
There is also information how certain aspects of the game work internally.
Unfortunately, at this point in time you have to know how to program / develop software to use / gain anything from it (and a good bit of reverse engineering knowledge would be preferable).

The podracer data is actually stored in the swep1rcr.exe, so it's hard to modify.
However, there is also a debug menu in the games N64 version.
We've documented how to open this menu on the PC version with a bit of trickery. It can be used to change podracer handling parameters.

Information is on GitHub: https://github.com/OpenSWE1R
Also join our gitter chat: https://gitter.im/OpenSWE1R

Attached is a screenshot from earlier today. We are currently working on supporting model and texture exporting from the game.
We'll work on re-importing those files at some other time. It's a lot of work and there's very few actively people working on this (actually only 1 until last week: me. Now we are 2).

Update: Please check my new thread for Cy Yunga and Jinn Reeso