If you go for a race game engine maybe consider doing something like spline or nurbs based tracks generated in the engine instead of created beforehand in max, maya,... The advantage would be less of a overhead on the triangle count to clip and sort into sectors. Fzero on the n64 did it like that and many track editors…
Ah ok. Honestly, I like Max a lot, I find it surprisingly easy to use after only studying it for about a week. The only things I don't like are that it runs like shit on my laptops, and crashes more frequently than almost any other program I've used. To avoid the possible problems, maybe I shouldn't import the transforms…