Every PS2 should have an FDS option. With the disc tray open/out you should be able to press triangle twice and the option will be there.

And yes, PAL is slower. Although Spyro moves faster in general, the loads and dragon cutscenes are slower than NTSC which ends up being slower overall. It's definitely fine to start running on though if it's all you have.

Also PAL doesn't have credits skip in 120%. Also, I believe only PS2 slim can do fast disc, those would be 70k-90k series.

Keep in mind that the NA version won't run on a PAL PS2, at least not without modding.