Is the chip actually dead, or just corrupted? I can imagine certain things causing the chip to get corrupted... game crash, power loss at just the wrong time, etc. But if it's actually dead, I'd think it's gotta be power (e.g. +5V too high, voltage spike at power up, etc... though strange that it'd kill just the EEPROM). Do you have a chip programmer? You'd need a way to erase the EEPROM to see if it's just corrupted... you can erase certain settings, etc. in setup mode, but I don't think there's a way to force the game to manually reinitialize the EEPROM.
Assuming you're talking about the PALs on the boardset for the steering wheels - I reverse engineered those and submitted them to the PLD Archive a while back:
https://wiki.pldarchive.co.uk/index.php?title=Super_Off_Road . U74, U75, and U82 are the chips for the 3 wheels... I believe U82 is the one for the middle (yellow) wheel. The chips are slightly different, so you can't just swap the chip from one of the other positions.
DogP