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I've seen the development pictures of Vdrift and it's progress over the years. The current nightly build has the best lightning since it's inception but it is still not enough. I gathered my and other users wishes I read over a number of threads. I know the things below will take maybe years to implement and are very hard to do, but I wanted to put all the things in one place.

Advanced options are not advanced enough.
Car detail:
-We should be able to choose the car body detail(simplest possible, medium, high poly, and for newer machines: tesselated, to future proof a relatively well done model and stop sweating every year to update it), type of reflection(none, static, low detail, higher detail, and rendered with image based lighting).
-Also the type of shadow it casts, and in the future: if I want the engine to render the suspension system and the drive shaft, or underside of the car or the brake calipers and rotor, or I choose to not see the tires bending when making a tight turn, just a static mesh.
-Car interior: fully/medium/low detailed, just a black blob inside or just make the windows not transparent. An option to display/hide driver/passengers.
-Do I want to see a soft body damage body or a premade one or even simply don't make it visible?
The car options should be totally independent of the environment's and viceversa.

World detail:
-First of, the game needs a shared library of textures and track elements(It does already, but it's still not there yet). Street lamps, trees, cones, TV cameras, spectators, types of road surfaces etc.
Yes, track creators MUST have freedom, but we also need some standards and rules because we never have enough time.
-Tracks should function like visual databases. View distance is not enough to make a game engine fast. It should be combined with some sort of algorithm that simply won't load a environment component in memory until it is in the camera's view angle. Far object should be striped away of detail that can't be visible(like the depth of windows inside a building at a far distance should be only a flat surface with a low resolution texture) more efficiently than it is currently done. It is possible. Maybe through a combination of tesselation and Intel's LOD? You know better.
-Light trails and light glow should work even without motion blur. Also, is it possible fake motion blur with some sort of layered transparent PNG textures that deform in the directions the car is going? Or whould it be as resource hungry option as traditional methods?
The idea is that visually things don't have to work like mother nature(eg: ray-tracing, global illumination) but should be faked(prerendered stuff, approximations). You can make something convincing without burning PC components.
These settings should be very granular so people can find the best looking configuration of the game for their 6 year old or bleeding edge PC. The game should be optimized and scalable.

Sorry for the long rant and grammatical errors. English is not my native tongue.

Also here are some reference photos with illumination conditions:
Sunny day, sun reflecting brightly off glossy paint.


Morning.


Clouded day.


Show.


Motion blur.


Night with street lights.



Night but far away from illumination.