I'd assumed the shine on the tyres had been done by the standard alpha-layer method and not specifically a bump-mapping method. silly me ^^;
As for the draw distance... well, my laptop is widescreen which is why I have to run the game on 1280x800 (else the display is all stretched). Since you don't want to add a 640x480 resolution (to which a 720x480 resolution could be added alongside as a widescreen variant) then that's all I could think of.
I'll have to check what 800x600 runs as, but like I said I have a widescreen display... :/
An alternate could be that you could code in a internal widescreen display mode? It would basically force a 16:9 display onto a 4:3 resolution (GTA4 does it) That way I could run the game on 800x600 but change the internal display to force a 16:9 aspect ratio on that display to match my screen size.
just an idea.
editAccording to Fraps, with settings on the absolute minimum:
800x600 - the game runs between 14 and 35 fps (depending on the number of cars on-screen at once)
1280x800 - the game runs between 10 and 20 fps, depending on the number of cars on screen.
Considering this laptop is horrid (ATI radeon x200 mobility for graphics) I think being able to play the game at 15fps with every car on display is a good frame rate. Maybe with a minimal draw-distancing implementation it might steady out at 25fps but as you don't want to implement that, I'll have to make do or play the game on my epicly awesome desktop PC ;]
Btw there may be a bug: Shadows don't work if the shader is disbled, right? When I changed the shadow setting from Low to High, there was absolutely -no- graphics change, but the frame rate dropped from 20 to 8. xD.