This thread was brought to my attention by José (community manager). I haven't read it, because I got the gist of it pretty quickly when I saw the link between older/younger teams. The main reason I didn't read through it is there wasn't really anything else I needed to know. When you get down to the level of thousandths of a second deciding results, I find it entirely plausible, that something like this could show up as a pattern. I'll make sure we look in to this because you might be on to something. I will explain why at the end, but first a disclaimer and clarification:
I don't work on the simulation of the races or qualifying, so I can only talk from a slightly more informed perspective than anyone else here, and many of you actually have way more data on the simulation than I do. I spend most of my time working on UI stuff and managing the team. I can tell you with total confidence that any effect like this is not by design. Let's make that absolutely clear. Any accusation that we've built in canned artificial effects designed to balance the game or something are simply wrong.
That said, here's why I think there might be something to this... the age of the team has a direct correlation to the numerical ID of the team. I also know that cars run qualifying in iGP in a particular format - one after another. It's possible that the qualifying order is determined by the team ID, and that in leagues where thousandths of a seconds count, this order may be impacting the qualifying performance in a marginal way. For example, perhaps the track is "rubbering in" as each lap is completed, giving those that run later a slight edge. Because this order may be determined by team ID, it could consistently show up in a pattern relating to team age, exactly as described.
I will run this hypothesis past the sim developers and see what they think, and whether there is something we can do about it, before getting back to you. For now, I just wanted to share my thoughts and that there are simulation based explanations for this behaviour, if it is happening. It's definitely not something canned or artificial outside of a simulation, because we don't have anything like that in the system.
Although i think you are probably correct about the order of qualifying etc having an effect i think there's more too it with this team (2012 team) than just that, i say that because look at the lap times gaps between my cars and the leaders in the first post, the gap between them is quite often huge, not thousandths but quite often 3-7 tenths of a second, thats what is not normal with this team, its like there's more than 1 problem.
To add weight to your qualifying order theory, this team always does much worse qualifying throughout a season when its running the number 1 & number 2 car numbers (even if you didnt win championship due to teams team numbers changing end of season randomly) compared to when they are running numbers in the 20's i've known this for many years, i see this with my newer generation teams (2018 teams) also and is a difference of thousandths like you say but it always hits my 2012 generation teams harder possibly because there is another issue with those teams on top of the qualifying order..