R&D glitch or am I going crazy ?

I don't know if I'm correct, but from what I have experienced, sometimes in qualifying, even if you're the last car to cross the finish line for your lap time and you get a time that would have put you in let's say p2, will actually put you in p8 or maybe even worse because at the end sometimes in my career mode qualifyings, for my sessions at the end the lap times of the AI are made faster by running a calculation of what the AI should get instead of what they actually got

Again I do not know if I'm correct but sometimes I swear this or something similar to this has happened to me

this is true as well but what I was trying to say is that I'm still driving the base Alfa Romeo car despite buying 15+ upgrades while the AI got significant lap times improvement with their own upgrades. For example on the first 3-4 races I was able to match my team mate and get into Q3 easily but it's been 3 races (Monaco-Baku-Canada) where the IA had a lot of upgrades and now I can't even get out of Q1 and I'm more than 1 second of my team mate

Not sure exactly how it is worked out but this has been around for donkeys and has Happened to me multiple times. Last one to cross the line smash it to scrape into q2 by .002 of a second final one to cross the line but end up 22 as everyone behind me has gone 0.5 secs quicker when the session has finished…. WTF

I'm in the same situation mate on copp career with Mt brother. Both started at Williams and upgraded the car loads, then contract renewals came along, and he moved to alpine  I opted to stay with Williams. A rookie driver came in alongside me, and before I started the first race, I checked r and d, and Williams where 4th quickest car. Frist race with a rookie driver seated with me, he qualified 8th and finished 5th, while I qualified 19th and finished 18th. He seemed to have a quicker cars. All the other cars seem to be upgrading, just not any user controlled cars.