This is something that bugged me quite a long time. The no shader fallback has no lighting due to the way car color is applied to model.
I've tried to fix this some time ago, but it didn't work as expected. I had a look at this issue again and it turned out that my first attempt to fix it actually works. There just seems to be a bug(haven't been able to identify it yet) in VDrift glstatemanager code that breaks it. The difference is quite obvious.
The glstatemanager is there for performance reasons, caches gl state. My current solution has to call OpenGL directly to work. Not sure how to deal with this atm. Just push the fix ignoring the state manager issue?