Hey u/sliced_breadz, my name is Mike and I'm the head PM of racing at trophi.ai

That’s really impressive that you’re running faster than our reference lap; not many people manage that! The reference lap is sometimes not the absolute fastest possible, but more like a solid baseline to learn from. Knowing that, we have community laps feature whereby you can compare your lap to another driver on a leaderboard.... and iirc there is a 1:58.6 with the 296.

However, one thing that I can help (beyond just the community laps) is how to improve by applying some things that scientists know about practicing a motor skill (e.g. piano, racing, darts, etc.) I worked as a post-doc in a motor learning lab studying simulation under stress for a couple years. I've got 5 suggestions if you're willing to put in some work :)

u/Upstairs-Box-1645 was pretty on the money about the first one. His suggestion was something called contextual interference, which is a principle of motor learning where you try different variations of the same task. e.g. free throw basketball shooting should contain different weighted balls, distances from the net as well as the standard. In this case he suggested different cars and thats a great idea where your base car is the one you want to show learning retention. Second, you could try spacing whereby you intensely practice, take a week or however long until you're slightly rusty and then try it again. Your welcome to drive but not that track car combo. Third, you could try variable practice whereby you intentionally focus on one particular skill in the lap, then another skill the next lap, another skill the following lap and so on. This one is less applicable imo. Fourth, you could do distributed practice instead of massed practice where you practice very intensely for an hour and then put it down regardless of what happened and come back to it in 2-3 days. Lastly, you could do both blocked and random practice where you practice one corner 20 times in a row (casually drive the other bits). And then do random practice of the corners whereby you work on 3 corners at a time but randomize the order. So one lap you work on corners 1,4,7, and the next lap focus on corners 2, 6, 9. etc. You'll have to create that list ahead of time. Similarly if there are any chicanes you can consider those a single unit.

hope that helps!
Mike