EA SPORTS WRC - race loads many minutes, and sometimes just freezes

Hello.  Started playing WRC last week, and it was going just fine.  Passed education, and entered career mode, and after 5-6th week noticed that it was taking longer and longer to load an event from calendar.  It was a few seconds at first, then it grew up to a minute, and now I'm at a point where it just cannot load it at all.  Shows loading screen, CPU load 80-100% with some minimal SSD activity, and sits for minutes like that.  Killing and restarting the game does not help.  I tried tuning down video settings to the lowest -- does not help.  CPU Intel i5 6 cores, 16 GB RAM, SSD 1TB (450GB free).

Tried entering championships or events -- behavior is the same.  Sits for minutes on "loading" screen, 80-100% CPU with some minimal SSD activity.