I think you are on to something with the Nvidia drivers. I found the following post by HeskyF1 here F1 25 - Instant crash at gamestart | EA Forums - 12219849 which "resolved" the issue for me, and the track starts every time.
- Open Documents in your file explorer
- open up my games folder and click f1 25
- Open up hardwaresetting folder
- open the harware_settings_config on wordpad by right clicking and pressing 'open with'
- once word pad is open scroll down till you find <rt_pathtrace enabled="true" />
- change it from true to false should look like <rt_pathtrace enabled="false" />
- Make sure you save the word pad then close it down
- right click on the hardware_settings_config again and scroll down to properties and change it to a read-only and then press apply
This is just a workaround really to the Nividia bug, not a full fix. I have used this on the latest Nvidia Game Ready Driver 576.52, so using this with the latest driver may stop the other crashes you are getting.
Hopefully this thread gets noticed by EA, then escalated to Nivida for a fix in a driver update.