Suggested

Exclude cars without strategy

Wouldn't it be better not having them during the live race?
I personally hate how much they interfere during the race, making it more luck based.
Could also be better for the farming problem. Not making them earn tokens or money and exp.

Personally I don’t agree and feel they can add to the challenge in live racing (although they aren’t good for offline racing). 

I doubt there will be a consensus on this since it would stop hosts from using bots to aid promotion in rookie and pro tiers (whether that is a bad thing is probably a discussion for another thread)

No set up no race. I like it.

This is great. If there were a way to exclude "Offline Leagues" which there are plenty of that are actively moderated and almost everyone sets up, but the rule is simply not to join the live race, that would be great. If it's supposed to be an active racing league, no setup no race is best.

Don't quite get why we need an exclusion for "Offline Leagues". No setup / practice lap or strategy set, means no race, no rewards seems like a fair approach.

This would also help curb the practice of farming, since the accounts that sit idle in leagues without setup or strategies won't gain any cash / token rewards.

As for the bots added to enable promotion, don’t think it would be an issue for the host to setup one race on each of the accounts during a full season.

 Why?  Are there fully offline leagues where you have to run default setup and strat?  Seems like a needless requirement otherwise.

Perhaps it would also be useful to set up an automatic strategy in case a manager doesn't make a strategy.

setting it EQUAL to that of the previous season..

Possibly, however then it sets you up for success if you were active for a full calendar season, then inactive for an entire season.

I don't like this idea. It would not be hard for somebody to simply sign in, adjust one setting by one point in the strategy, save, and exit the game.

Additionally, it would punish players who forgot to perform a setup in time but still want to race.

Correct, but as it stands both of those alternatives make you not at all competitive, and keeps the slow car on the track.