Despite what the FAQ says, I was able to see things typed in Russian just fine. Of course, I can't understand a single word of Russian (except possibly recognising Moscow when I see it written in cyrillic), but it's still good to see the characters show up right

I had the game crash on me once, exactly the crash mentioned in the FAQ, but I think that's surprisingly stable for an old game running on Windows XP which in turn is running virtualised on a Mac. The only problem I had with my setup was that I needed to reassign the chat key since F9 to F12 are taken by system functions on OS X, and they get priority even when Windows is running.
So that's why I didn't reply to messages in-game during the race. Apologies if anyone got annoyed.
Otherwise all I need is some practise to get back into the swing of things. Even after not playing the game for years it was surprisingly easy to get some basic feel for the worlds back.