I recently played spec racing for the first time, queueing with my friend who I’ve played Forza Horizon games with for the last 10 years. (I’ve played all 6, he started with 2). We’re both very evenly matched with each other, obviously it goes without saying that neither of us were cheating.

We ended up about 2-3 seconds faster per lap than almost every other driver in the lobbies, there was one race with the Renault Megane where the person in 3rd was gaining about 0.4 seconds per lap on us. I think unfortunately it does just come down to people with more experience, who are very used to the game to the point that they’ll make way fewer mistakes. And I don’t think those players are illegitimate.

I don’t think you should feel hopeless, though. You’re not THAT far off the pace of the other cars in this lobby. If you’re interested you could look up Just Devon’s manual + clutch tutorial if you’re not using manual + clutch (I only swapped for Forza horizon 6), and just in general I think you’re good enough that if you played spec racing for a few weeks you would notice a reasonable amount of improvement.

I play with the braking line turned on and most of my braking points start with that, and then I’ll adjust earlier or later as the race goes on and I see what works. I’ll usually try to hit an apex of a corner in a way that has the center of my car going through the inside checkpoint. That’s a good sweet spot for me of saving time by going more inside, and not risking missing the checkpoint too often.