So last season in our league I finished as 5th overall, so I wasn't promoted to the elite, which is fine because that would be my 3rd overall season and I would've been under developed and beaten hard.
This season, even though I missed out on the first 3 races, I spent my upgrade points and all, but somehow I finish as 8-9th consistently even though we only have 4 new teams. My car settings are perfect, strategies are more or less the same as last season, I keep the tyre temperature in the middle, there's even a team that has worse driver, worse car and beats me by 30s.
There are some other intersting things that I don't know about.
Like how the tyre is performing better as the it wears down. Not even joking, my pace is better with each lap, even at 15%.
No, it's not that the grip on the track gets better, because when I pit for fresh it slows down. Like for example if I pit for SS for the last 10-15 laps, I perform worse than I did with 20-25% soft tyres.
Also I heard that a driver's talent matters a lot, and it worths more than any other stat, it's almost like a multiplier. But there were multiple occasions when I was beaten by a 1-talent driver with other stats being around 10-12 (my driver was like 8 talent but 8-9 other stats), and I even had one of the best cars in that season, while they didn't. And again, it wasn't about strategy, they outpaced me with hard tyres while I had soft, and it wasn't like they could go full on those tyres and I couldn't, because I could easily push those softs.