Thought I'd have a quick go at rendering one LFS car just to kill some time, two hours have passed and I've just been spending time fixing material IDs and smoothing groups to actually get model prepared. Also nice to find out that scenes don't include textures they require and since DDS Converter does not work on Vista, had to go hunting for alternative app. Even after all that is done, I still have to replace all brazil materials since I prefer using Mental Ray, which would be easier if they were named to indicate which material is for tires and so on.
....too much work, back to modeling instead.