so, I just went kinda deep on this and then came to the discovery that:
given the timing of the releases this makes total sense; the Europe saw it just a couple of months after the Japanese version, and I can’t find any European publications giving the PS2 release’s handling quite as much of a battering as those in the US
so, I guess I was already playing with the original tuning lmao
EDIT: also wikipedia was unclear about this, and wrong about the regions which missed out on the online mode, so I fixed that