Hey,
Unfortunately that's a tall order as it is not simply a case of tuning the engines down or the like. The realism of the game falls short in a number of different aspects like track surface (bumps, dips, camber, road texture, grip from different surfaces), air simulation (way beyond just drag and downforce: humidity, effects on turbo, engine performance and cooling), tyre model (load sensitivity, coefficient of grip, wear and degradation, contact patch, compound hysteresis and deformation) and collision physics (kerbs, suspension compression and expansion, bottoming out), etc.
The best the game can aim for is to replicate a familiar feel, the general experience of driving these high downforce, high power open wheelers. There's no way it will ever be a 1:1 reproduction of real life lap times.
Even if physics were perfect, the game would still render faster laptimes as you can just go round and round and round endlessly around the track 🙃
So how close can they be, the game and real life laptimes? Hard to tell, but trust me it's way more important to get the feeling and handling right over just the cold stopwatch numbers. And the game is making strides in the former (experience), whereas the latter are unachievable without laser scanned tracks and a closer relationship with Pirelli and F1 Teams. More realistic times will come as consequence of a better simulation.
Just the fact that the game still has a ton of info readily available for anyone to take a peek at with their unencrypted ERP files shows there's still waaays to go, despite the heroic and wondrous work of the likes of David Greco 💞
F1 23 has been praised by real F1 personnel. That's a high mark, way higher than getting only the lap times right.
