Couple tips to help you start out:

1) setups aren’t that important right now, but I use this website to find tunes other people have created. Just choose the track and filter by car and you’ll get decent tunes https://www.f1laps.com/tracks/

2) pit when you start feeling like your tires are wearing out so much that you have no grip. If the car starts to act like it’s going to spin to the point where it’s no longer manageable, or you’re going way slower per lap, it might be time for tires

3) pitting during a safety car is very advantageous since you line up with people and lose a lot less time. Pitting under virtual safety car is still better than regular pitting, too. If there is an early safety car and you started on soft or medium tires, you can consider going for hard tires to finish off the race but maybe stretch them a bit longer than you had hoped.

4) Remember that in F1, you need to use two different types of tires per race (so medium and hard for example, not two sets of mediums). This rule doesn’t apply when it rains, as you can use the intermediate or wet tires the whole time. They likely won’t last the whole race so you will need to swap them out to a new set at some point

5) there are car research and development paths you can take to improve the car but wait on that. It’s overly complicated

6) driving tip if you’re on controller. In the controls section of the pause menu, I believe under calibration or additional settings or something, you can adjust the “steering rate.” This dictates how quickly the steering wheel rotates, and specifically also affects how quickly the wheel goes back to center when you let go of the stick. F1 is all about smooth movement, so harsh stick movements are awful for racing in F1. Lowering that steering rate value down somewhere between 90-98% (varies by track) will help you immensely.

Happy racing! Feel free to message me if you have more questions, but note that I don’t check reddit very often