The reason light maps are used is more because we dont have the power to shade everything in real time, however this is slowly changing with Forward+ and Deffered and more with the tiled and clustered version of these methods. These are allowing us to do hundreds of lights in complex scenes which makes the need for using a lightmap less and less.

If you are making a racing game you will want to look into motion blur techniques too.

I have some topics on 3d at http://www.gamedevpensieve.com/graphics/3d and i keep lots of links to reference material. Some of them might contain something new for you. Need to add lightmaps, looks like i forgot them :).

I've played a lot of racing games over the years and seen a lot of effects overdone. Don't implement god-rays and fireworks, this isn't Grid2. No offence meant, NightCreature83 ;-)

Here's a few things I think you'll need: motion blur; environmental reflections on cars; shadowing on the track and cars from nearby objects; shadowing on the track from cars; probably some kind of tessellation for curved road and scenery sections; smoke; dynamic lighting from headlights/brake lights; very nice shading models for the track and cars.

I can't stress the last point enough. If you're making a racing game you're expecting me to spend a lot of time looking at your simulation of some tarmac. I also probably drive a car myself in real life, and I instinctively know what a real road and real cars looks like. Your textures, shading models and illumination tricks need to hold up to that standard. Take into account new/old surfaces with different material properties, patches of grease or oil, tyre rubber impregnating the asphalt in the braking and traction zones on the racing line, wet surfaces and standing water etc. And some of these need to be dynamic, i.e. cars laying down rubber as the race progresses.

I know this is a lot, and I know that even the latest racing games don't get it right, but this stuff is the target. But start small, concentrate on maybe two or three of these effects that you think are most important. I'd say get the curved surface tessellation stuff going as best you can (polygon kerbs are awful) and then a nice material model for the track that just gets the fundamental light response right for night racing. Go for a drive, take some photos.

Don't worry about foliage simulation for now. If I'm close enough to see how your trees are rendered then I've already crashed. ;-)

Phong Shading/Lighting is nothing more than a relatively good and cheap approximation of the way surfaces actually react to light.

Bump maps are a way of cheaply creating the impression that a surface or model is more complex than it actually is.

The infamous "fast inverse-square-root hack" - great explanation here, btw.

LOD schemes that use progressively simpler geometry the farther objects are from the camera, or just billboarded-sprites.

A "modern" trick is PBR, which is currently free to use in Unity 5 and Unreal Engine 4. I haven't used it extensively, but it looks like it is going to be a really quick way to get good results once you learn the system. The same texture set can be used on objects, regardless of whether they are in dark or light situations, as the lighting calculation is "based on realism" as they say. Reflection probes(in both engines) let you have nice reflections at a somewhat cheap rendering cost, and work great for things like have the cars outside reflect/mirror the street lamps, but when in tunnels, reflect the tunnel lighting(which may be on the sides instead of the top). I mean the actual geometry though, not just the lighting/shading part.

I know this isn't the same type of trick as what started this topic. But I find PBR to be pretty exciting.

LOD schemes that use progressively simpler geometry the farther objects are from the camera, or just billboarded-sprites.

Be careful with LOD in fast moving games. Combined with streaming, you can get "popping" as models change in detail in obvious ways as you barrel down upon them. Having lots and lots of LOD levels can help with this.

If you can, use a program like simplygon to auto generate them and then fine tune them in your 3d modelling program.