Text is pointless, if it's too small to read.
Consider this:
On your track creator, the font that provides instructions is 12 pixels high. (white pixels only)
On a 42" (106.68cm) TV, this equates to a physical height of less than 6mm.
At 13 feet, this resolves to a perceived height of around 1mm.
Have you ever tried reading a font that appears to be about 1mm high? As a comparison, on a 20" monitor @1680x1050, Arial at 8pts from 75cm is about 1.1mm. Try reading a page of text at that size, from 75cm and you will get an idea of what people have to deal with. I'm pretty sure you won't spend long reading text that small.
There is one fundamental aspect of game design that has to be considered as primarily important. That is "Is the information/content we display, perfectly visible at the optimal viewing distance for the average size display?". In the case of a 42" TV, that is from 7 to 14 feet. (213 to 426 centimetres)There is no excuse for that design aspect to ignored. The world isn't made up of gamers that have 20/20 vision. But a large percentage use their consoles at that distance. If your art director or producer isn't keeping a grip of something that basic, then you have problems.
You are not the first developer to fall foul of this, and I find the increasing frequency very alarming. As a professional games developer, I find a lack of consideration for the gamer, in favour for pure aesthetic content, extremely disturbing. Even more so, when there is no excuse for making critical text that small. I know German can cause issues with text formatting, but priority must be given to readability. If it isn't readable, then it's pointless... and if it's pointless, it might as well not be there. And we all know what a pain trying to come up with universal icons is... so give your text a reason to be there.
It's not even as though your on-screen indicators are in danger of falling outside the safe-frame. Spread them out, put the text on two lines, and make the font readable for the distances people use their consoles at. The text used in the messages isn't much better either.