What you describe is effectively a servo.
When you drive, you don't know the position of the rack (some cars have mechanical or electronic systems for adjusting the applied movement depending upon speed and are not 1:1), you turn the wheel to achieve the required radius, as I said, you are part of the feedback system, all you are doing is turning the wheel remotely.
If an RC car travelling at ridiculously high scale speeds is able to cope using an RC servo (using a single turn pot), why can't you just scale it up?
Turning the wheel 15deg on a RC car or a real one, only really differers in the scale of power required.