Thanks for the advice!
I'll have to take a look at the airbrake sensitivity again as well as those videos, as I'm pretty sure that some of the time I'm losing is inefficient lines through corners. Phantom is hard to get comfortable with racing lines (hard to just subconsciously sideshift at the end of a corner so I don't have to turn so sharp lol). I don't expect to get anywhere near the leaderboard times (Assegai is slow).
I think I just need to do a lot of laps in SL, haha.