Animation plays back correctly when played in Sequencer, but breaks In-Game

Hey,
I have a pretty complex chaos vehicle setup for a racing kart with an animated driver included. I used a Take Recorder to record some tutorial scenarios. When playing back the takes in a level sequencer they all work nicely and everything looks fine.

The problem is that when I play the sequence in-game only the driver keeps the correct animation. The vehicles stay in place (no transformation) but the vehicle’s skeleton gets animated correctly - the wheels and the steering wheel turn correctly.
The driver however keeps the complete correct transformation and skeletal animation even in-game, which is weird since the driver and the vehicle body are both the children of the same skeletal mesh.

The transformation data is verifiably present in the subsequence (which is expected since it animates correctly in Level Sequencer).

Has anyone experienced anything similar before?
Any ideas how to solve this issue?

Cheers,
Vid