A while back I was watching the first episode of the Mobil 1 series One Make, this one about driver Mia Lovell, and as I recall there was talk about hopes for where she would qualify or finish and talk about how there's no reason that women can't be as competitive as men in motorsport. This got me thinking about the relative skill of racing drivers and some misconceptions from the general public.
With racing games, players seem to generally view it as they're supposed to finish in first place every time, and not doing so is failure. Granted, everyone wants to win, whether in a game or in reality. We all want that. However, this black and white, Ricky Bobby perspective of "If you ain't first you're last" is ridiculous. Even if you go through the world hand-picking the best twenty drivers on Earth and put them all together in a race, there's still only going to be one person finishing in first. That doesn't mean the guy in second or even in twentieth (last) is bad. They're still the top twenty on Earth. The top twenty just can't all have a twenty-way tie for the win. Finishing in a position other than first isn't what any of us wants, but it's going to happen and doesn't mean we're bad.
Anyone can hop into a fast car and drive fast. They can even make a race of it. At an amateur level, like the local dirt tracks I've frequented, you can have drivers from across the spectrum, from having no racing skill at all to talented experts and everything in between. However, as drivers work their way up the professional ladder, the unskilled drivers get weeded out and you've got increasingly exclusive, elite driver sets operating at a level few people can drive. This means that even the drivers that seem like complete bozos are still better than most of us. Even if a driver is consistently taking up the rear and finishing at the bottom, they may be less skilled than the folks they're competing against but not bad drivers. They're still probably more skilled than you or me.