Actually I think you're right smf, I think ride-on just used a big spring for centering, the residue is probably from someone lubricating that, like you said.
After seeing the scan of the ride-on time difficulty settings it throws a spanner in the works as those settings show that on the easiest time difficulty dip switch setting you start stage 1 with 75 seconds. However on the roms that I've dumped you start easy setting with 90 seconds on the clock. So either the manual is wrong (which it could well be as it shows that you start stage 1 on HARD skill level with 80 seconds which is more than the easy and medium difficulty settings, surely the amount you start with should go DOWN as the difficulty gets harder, not up!) or something else is going on here.
But then the youtube video that 'super' posted of the guy trying to play the broken ride-on shows that he started the race with 80 seconds on the clock (it's impossible to see the countdown time when the race starts but you can time a real game of Hang-On in MAME against the video until such point where you can see the actual timer on the screen on the video and then work backwards from that to the amount that would have been on the clock at the start of the game). My roms give you 80 seconds on the clock if the time difficulty is set to hard (just like the manual scan shows for the hard setting). He never makes it to a checkpoint due to the throttle cable being busted so it's not possible to see how much extra time he would have gotten had he done so.
Anyway, I've had a reply from the guy on the J+ forums and we're in luck! He does have a ride-on Hang-On and he's kindly going to take some pics of his boards so that might prove conclusive as to whether these roms have come out of a ride-on Hang-On or not. He hasn't said yet whether he has the ability to be able to dump the roms.