First off thank you for your kind words and II I like your post for its detail. Explaining what is required during a 20-minute race. Plenty of information which all drivers would normally have to work out for oneself. Which I like to call heads up information for others. I thank you for sharing.
To me what makes me fast-ish is plenty of practice and working on that setup. But first I give the default set up a damn good thrashing before I make any changes at all. Giving you everything it's got with a default setup whilst taking notes where things are not working as they should or as I would like. My setup is extremely important to me as I have no natural talent.
And I'm never satisfied with my setup I always seem to think it can be improved which is probably true.
The only real suggestion I can make to go faster is understanding what the car is doing and what you want it to do and not do and how to make it do what you want it to do. Wow, that's a lot of dos.
When I practice on the leaderboard or anywhere else I push it as hard as possible as to me it doesn't matter if I go on the track but when I do I try to understand if it was my mistake or the mistake of the car because I haven't got the right settings yet. When I go off the track it's helping me.
It's giving me the information that I need to make my setup. In real racing, they have engineers and all the computers in the world to help them to tell them what the cars doing. In sim racing, we only got going off the track and figuring out if it was the driver or with a car not complying to your wishes. Probably not the best way but it works for me. Like I said you have to understand whether it's you or the car which will be 90% of the time.
It is never a lot of one thing to adjust. Nine-tenths of the time it's very little of anything and somethings nothing needs adjusting at all. A little bit of toe may be a click or two on one of the bumps or rebounds one click on the front suspension to make it little stiffer to take out some oversteer. Lowering the front ride height to give it better turn in etc.
As the saying says less is more. A little bit of this and a little bit of that. One-click on one of the settings could make all the difference in what you're looking for in any particular corner or even the whole circuit.
Try not to concentrate on one section of the track because if you do this for too long you will be slower in another. Try to concentrate on handling going onto long straights concentrate on handling into corners especially the overtaking ones. And especially in a race.
The big question is understanding what each one of these settings does as some settings do the same thing and you've got to understand which one to adjust as the wrong one may affect the car elsewhere on the track. And if you've got the time for a trial and error that's just fine. And 90% of the time the more unstable the car is the faster it is. So don't be looking for stability. Look for speed keep an eye on that delta time in that section. But in saying that if you can get stability with the speed you will certainly get consistency, lap after lap. Which is ideal for race conditions but not necessary for hot lapping. As race setups are usually slower as you are altering your setup for consistency and with alterations for racing comes stability. If you got the car to stay on the track now but it's handling like a bitch but it's faster that'll do nicely. Move on to the next section and so on making it stay on the track but as fast as possible. It's all good fun it takes time but it's fun.
Anyway here's my setup for the Porsche maybe you would like to compare with your own. But taking my style your style into consideration.
When you can push as hard as you can it's only at this point you will get the information that you need to make your setup like I said it doesn't matter if it goes off the track as that is still more information.
Of course, this is for hot lapping.
Racing is somewhat a different setup strategy.
Have a fun race.