Suggested

to avoid leadership in Elite

Just be patient and work on HQ development. Either they're actually better or they bought tokens to boost their HQ early. I notice a lot of drivers in your league aren't fitness-trained though, including both of the leader's drivers and one of yours. (The other looks like they're only fitness trained because you bought them from someone else.)
I don't really enjoy seeing people buy a head-start either but without it the game wouldn't run.
Just remember you can't buy anything that can't be earned through patience.

Edit:
There are a lot of other small things that many managers don't realise the importance of, that are only visible to the manager themselves, which makes it difficult to evaluate a league.
Some managers are just completely clueless. A level 16 just joined my league with level 2 drivers, another player in my league is active (logs in almost daily), but dropped to Rookie because they don't upgrade or repair their cars.

Well if you don't want a team to dominate you need to bring the fight to them, instead of asking to impose things to weaken the dominant team. You don't see most managers at the top asking to impose things to nerf winning teams or bring the fight closer, and those who usually ask for things to nerf winning teams don't win much either way because they don't bother to improve themselves. They instead moan repeatedly about always having worse qualifying positions (even when they qualify well, better than the winning team, or even 1-2 or top of those on same tyres), having worse pace, and that whatever they do they'll always lose, instead of reviewing their decisions, mistakes - the main reason managers lose, especially in competitive leagues, is because of their own mistakes, trust me on this -, and seeing what they can do better.

This game has a design cap which means no team should have a definite pace advantage over another, and if everyone has similarly Talented drivers then there should be no advantage gained there either. Thus, the first thing is to make sure your HQ (focus on design, manufacturing, and technology levels only first) is as high a level as possible for your manager level to make sure your car design & KERS and DRS is decent. Building your HQ is important to ensure your car is competitive. I have never spent a single cent on this game across all my 3 teams, but managed my tokens to be able to fast-build the relevant HQ upgrades I could get at the time. Also remember to utilize Research to get more car design points per race. Next is to find high Talented drivers, or at least those competitive against other teams in your league. After that, make sure you repair cars and replace engines regularly.

Then the rest is knowledge & experience with game mechanics & gameplay, especially management of push levels, choice of strategies (Hards are OP at the moment so if you don't know which tyre to use just spam them, especially after your first stint), and in-race tactics like KERS usage which are keys to being competitive and winning. Each track is also different, from the gaps created between cars, to the location and strength of the DRS straight, pit lane length relative to the track, tyre heating & amount you can push, and so on. Also, attending the live viewer helps as you can control push levels, KERS management, and change strats if necessary.

Once again, since this game is non-pay-to-win, if there's a team consistently better than yours or the rest of the field, especially if they're roughly the same level (winning team in your league is level 11 like you), then there has to be some things they're doing better than the rest of the league. Learn from them.

Well, what more can there be other than being a better manager & on form, having a properly developed HQ, and spamming Hards (jk)? There is absolutely no way for your cars by default to have significantly better pace than managers with equally developed teams. Which is why to ask for outside interference to "level the playing field" or stuff similar to that, in a game that's not just non-p2w but also gives everyone the same opportunities as long as their manager level can afford it, is just undermining the fact that the main reasons managers win is that they've managed to play better throughout the season. In the case of close competition especially, it is mostly down to even the smallest decisions, and competitive managers managing to put up a good, close fight should have nothing to be ashamed of even if they miss out on the championship.

--- warning, paragraphs of walls of text belowww ---

As for whether there is something out there which unlocks hidden pace by default apart from a properly developed team & staff, I've tried all the different suppliers, tried both drivers from the transfers and YDA, and from my experience it makes no noticeable or significant difference in the current iteration of the game. If there were something that dominant managers do differently that gives them by default much better pace (apart from spamming Hards, /jk), a lot of players would have adopted whatever they were doing by now and would be able to observe their better results as a consequence of whatever magical thing the top managers were doing. Till this day I have absolutely no idea how significant the different supplier bonuses are in the new iGP, and have absolutely no idea what stats apart from Talent do to drivers; my un-maxed drivers perform similarly to my maxed ones, for instance. I also mostly just copy the car design of the more competitive managers because I don't understand how that works either apart from the rule of max the big 4 first. There are quite a number of things about the current iteration of the game that players like me are unable to observe the consequences of, either because the game does not make it sufficiently clear what certain stats do, or any significant difference or correlation is hard to observe or conclude beyond mere speculation. I also don't do huge amounts of testing, so probably someone who does or knows the source code would know better than I do.

I have however seen how suboptimal racing decisions and mistakes are the leading causes of races lost, from KERS management to in-race strategy changes in wet weather. In highly competitive leagues the difference is not 5-10 seconds between 1-2 and 3-4, but 5-10 seconds between 1st and 10th, and that is the level where even the littlest things make a difference between the very best, not some big secret that makes the life of the manager on top easy.

For consistently big gaps where one team absolutely dominates the rest, usually it means either the competition has yet to learn the competitive strategies for the track and conditions & how to execute them well, or have yet to have some of the fundamentals down as well as the winning team. For strategies, it takes some copying, experience, and eventually experimentation. Winning strategies may also change, because like every other game with strategic elements, the meta changes thanks to player innovation. For game fundamentals, they can be pre-race management such as car design & research - at least the fundamental of maxing acc, bra, hand, & down first -, drivers & staff, budget, to in-race stuff such as push level management - we know that it is high push in corners, low push on straights; but how we do it and how well we execute it could be another matter. Other knowledge of the game such as how the tyres behave on different tracks and conditions also comes from experience, reviewing, and understanding.

This is different from a winning team in a close league where multiple teams & multiple strategies can win, and thus every little decision makes a difference. In this case the championship winning team is usually the one which makes better decisions and less mistakes.

I don't chase after vague theories or excuses (even though I can get tilted, uhuuhuu...) or ask for top teams to be nerfed - they have the same resources available to them as every other player. I learn from what managers are doing better than me, and take advantage of whatever luck or opportunities come my way (kekeke).

Also, at the moment you might want to test your theory in another league, perhaps with another account *winks*. I recommend the one with 4 10k rep managers (not necessarily the accounts they are playing in that league) active in it at the moment *whistles* Cheers!