The TV show had little if anything to do with the game.
Pole Position, an arcade game by Namco/Atari (later ported to home game consoles), used a method of pseudo-3D rendering that involved
- drawing a still picture of a road going off into the distance
- doing a complex parallax scroll, changing the horizontal scroll register at the beginning of each scanline to simulate the twists and turns of the road
Later Pole Position clones (such as Rad Racer) would expand on this technique by also changing the vertical scroll register to simulate hills. Such techniques weren't limited to racing either; NBA Jam and Street Fighter II draw their floors this way.