i'm stuck between hard and expert still. i've decided to basically alternate between the two so i don't win the driver's championship my rookie year. i get top 5 consistently on hard and get bottom 5 consistently on expert. purple all testing on hard and can only purple the first one (farthest to the left), track acclimitazation (sp?). forget about a slider codies, just give me a "legbone" difficulty between hard and expert. in all seriousness it seem a lot of people are in the same boat as me and i just can't "get gud". i think a slider is in order.
I think it varies by track too. For instance, in Hungaroring, I'm about 0.2s off the pace in qualifying compared to my team mate. Next race is in Hockenheim, which is admittedly a much easier track, and I'm 0.2s faster than my team mate. In fact, I qualified 13th when I qualified 21st in the previous race. It feels like they need an adaptive difficulty setting, estimate what's going to be fun for you based on your times around races, which they have a lot of data for.
There are tools out there for extracting the game data and modifying car performance, but that only comes in 4 difficulty levels where there are 8 in the actual game, so I don't actually know how they're determined.