There are existing racing games that allow for the development of AI car control. RARS has been around for many years, enabling some good academic research, see
http://rars.sourceforge.net/
TORCS has now replaced RARS, see
http://torcs.sourceforge.net/ - not sure how popular this is though; some of the more recent test events don't seem to have attracted any participants!
If you start digging around the research in this area, you'll find that developing AI control of a racing car is no simple matter. Apart from the constraints of a real-time environment, there are huge challenges working out a fast racing line, compounded by complications like overtaking and defending your position on track.
However, when you look at events like Robocup you'll see how collaboration between the teams (code is made freely available after each competition) has aided the development of multi-agent systems. As an existing game with a good following, I'm sure if a car-control interface was provided for LFS, there would be a small number of researchers interested in developing their own AI drivers.
Thinking slightly bigger, Robocup succeeds because it has a grand aim ... developing a humanoid football team that can beat the 2050 World Cup winning team (Brazil vs the robots!). Perhaps the racing equivalent would be an AI Sim Driver winning a race against F1 drivers by 2050. Given that F1 cars are already largely controlled by electronics rather than mechanical devices, maybe that wouldn't be so hard to imagine ... just would need sufficient resources working on the AI side.
Food for thought.