Abstract We study one-loop soft gluon effects in a scalar quark QCD model of the Drell-Yan process. We find that factorization of the type suggested by Politzer holds at order m 2 / s , but fails at order m 4 / s 2 . We suggest that this pattern holds to higher orders, and that the non-factoring terms are not suppressed by form factors. We compute the non-factoring contributions, and give a classical interpretation of our results.