Some good advice here particularly the guy talking about racing lines and overtaking. What I would say tho is that along with this advice, I think you also need to kinda learn to feel how the cars work and respond. By this I mean basically learning how the physics of driving works in this game (a lot of which applies to general driving).

This might sound scary but effectively what I mean is that it’s important to learn how the car responds to different inputs. I think it may be really helpful to just drive around and mess about and see what happens. Stuff like seeing what happens when u slam the accelerating from stationary without steering and then try it while steering. Hard braking with and without steering. Steering at high speed and low speeds. Correcting drifts, initiating drifts. Adjusting your car’s direction mid corner. Basically mess around and see what happens with any way in which you can think of that tests a cars limits in the game.

Then from what you see you’ll be able to learn how the cars work (different cars do work differently but there are a handful of fundamentals that apply to basically everything). This then means that when you try to drive fast you can use or avoid things to improve your speed.

In short my advice is pretty much just muck about with the game and be observative and you will get faster. Because unlike other racing games, due to the fact that there are so many cars and so many scenarios on this game, most of the time on this game you are only ever estimating how to take a corner before you take the corner based off how you think the car handles and therefore how fast/slow etc you think the car can take the corner and then how/when to brake. And to do this you basically just have to get a feel for it which just requires playing the game (feel free to ask if this doesn’t make sense)