OK, 24hrs later and I can advise I have bitten the bullet, bought a new car and started grinding. I'm pretty sure Nowcontrol will improve soon and eclipse my lead with a 'ground' car, so this time I hope to be ready. We'll see.
I dropped the power down from 636bhp to 623bhp to emulate the difference between me and Kossie (in reverse) and after a few laps found I was around the 1:48.4 mark, mind you it was a pretty quick experiment. Anyway it showed a difference of about .8 sec. Which is significant, albeit perhaps not very accurate.
So started grinding at Daytona last night and checked this morning at 5:30am and it was stuck in the wall and had been for 5 hours, ha ha. No matter, started it off again and after the boys went to school this morning ran it at the Special Stage Route X, manually of course and soon made it over the 1st 1,000 km. Naturally I got sick of this after a while, doing the turns and correcting the crashes into the wall at 410km/h etc, so decided to go back to Daytona and just let it grind away.
But, I forgot to go into Settings before I left and so lost all my miles (km), ha ha ha. Anyway started again, did some more at Route X and am now back at Daytona with 2,700 km on the speedo and watching Ronan on TV with the boys.