@DonBlanko As someone who races on both wheel and pad, I also have experienced poor grip at Baku with both types (I've posted about this very thing in the past week).
You're absolutely correct about the AI (was going to make a reply about this yesterday) in that it's too high by about 1.5 seconds for the difficulty compared to other circuits, and that in turn has a knock-on effect of A. the AI disappearing out of sight after several laps, when on other circuits you'd be comfortably in among the pack, and B. causes you to try too hard and spin out on what is already a difficult track due to the surface type.
Worse still, the AI doesn't suffer from the same issues and obstacles as the player does. It's essentially on pre-programmed rails, each difficulty giving a target time, and any spins you witness are "canned events" (that actual phrase is used in the XML code), where it will just randomly cause a car to spin at several pre-determined points on the circuit. It's a horribly false and scripted way of trying to portray Artificial Intelligence when there's no real intelligence to begin with. It doesn't think or behave for itself. It can't even move out of the way of a car stuck on the track, it'll just sit there, causing all the other cars to sit behind that in one big numb-brained queue...
The only way to solve the problem of the AI being too quick is to drop your difficulty level by 15 (this is what I've found anyway). No shame in it, especially when the game is so inconsistent. An added factor of dropping the difficulty is that by every 10% (so levels 100, 90, 80, 70 and so on on) you gain a tiny percentage of grip. This was a thing I found in the difficulty files of the 2012 era games and I believe it's still present today, judging by the feel of the car on pad anyway.
But it would be ideally wonderful to get a new AI model which struggles with grip, tyre wear, tyre temps, dry and wet lines in real time, as opposed to the fakery we have right now. But I've been crying out for that for 7 years now, so I wouldn't hold my breath...
