How to Practice and Finish Well
This is just a bunch of notes for your dumb ass to read, they'll be all over the place so read it and apply it.
Practicing
Stop trying so hard. You're not going to beat those top lap times. Don't worry about being "slow." Worry about finishing without incident. Simple fact is a) you're not good enough (yet 🤠) and b) they reset 50,000,000 times to get that lap. It's pointless and pretty much just for dickwaving.
Car Choice
Sadly, the first thing I can say is pick an easy to drive car. Whether it's something like iRacing, Assetto Corsa Competizione, GT: Sport, or even an /ovg/ series. Even if car [x] is known to be the fastest, if it's a handful to drive then don't touch it. You're not going to get better if you're having to wrangle both the car and your brain cells. Generally, front engine cars will be the easiest to understand and exhibit the most predictable characteristics. For an /ovg/ series in particular, check the wiki page for the series. The easiest car will probably be written down.
Consistency
You'll be surprised at how high up you can finish, in any multiplayer racing game, if you just get consistent and develop a sense for reading other players around you. A majority of people playing racing games are so pathetically shit (because their consistency is in the toilet) that if you simply have races without incident, you'll end up very high up on the race results, even against people who are considered statistically to be better than you.
Work on being consistent. Can't figure out the racing line? Watch (either in game, or Google a video) someone fast to see what the racing line is. Copy the line they're doing, but don't do it fast. Copy what line they're doing. Not where they're braking. Not where they're hitting the gas. Just the line. Drive even slower than what you're comfortable with. Just work on hitting the racing line. If you're managing to go off the track, spin under braking, getting loose on the gas or just any sort of thing that upsets the car then you're still going too fast. Do this for awhile, which means 20-30mins+ all at once. Don't reset your car or whatever, just keep driving.
Once you're able to very consistently drive slower than what you're comfortable with, remember it. That's your baseline. It's what you'll fall back to if you feel yourself pushing too hard and making mistakes in the race. If you earnestly practiced it, your "baseline" will get you to the finish (and a good result none the less) just about every single time.
tl;dr eat shit for skipping to this and read the whole thing. Drive slower and work on hitting your marks VERY consistently. There's a huge chance you're overestimating how good you are, especially if you've been playing racing games since you were a toddler and your subconscious thinks you're hot shit because you can destroy the AI. Actual people are much better and way more (un)predictable.
Driving With Others
If it's an /ovg/ series, there's almost guaranteed to be a practice server up 24/7 on the track being raced. Ask in the thread, Discord or Mumble if someone wants to hop on the server with you. Or even check the Live Timing to see if someone is on at that moment.
Other Notes
I hate to sound like a fucking shill but learning all of this (consistency, racing around others, developing a "shitter" sense) is honestly pretty easy in iRacing. There's various promotion codes out there which are usually listed on the right of the iRacing Reddit page, one of which is a 3 month subscription for $5. Don't feel inclined to buy anything, just run the rookie Mazda MX-5 Cup series. It'll throw infinite curveballs at you, and it'll teach you how to deal with all sorts of shit.
