With eg duckstation you can overclock the emulated cpu of the ps1 and overcome performance issues which also happened on original hardware in some games. In some cases it will cause issues on its own like weird physics glitches or faster gameplay. But as far as i remember driver and driver 2 were games which profited from the "virtual" overclock with no added issues. Depending on the hardware it can be a pretty heavy hit on the performance of the real cpu though. Duckstation itself is probably also a bit more performance hungry on itself. But it might be worth a try since in the best case you just need to transfer the memory card save file and keep playing on duckstation where you left of on pcsxr.