I've started trying to win this race with as many cars as possible (on Hard difficulty) to try keep things interesting whilst grinding credits. After a few hours of stubborn trial and error, I managed to drag the Abarth 500 kicking and screaming to a win. I wouldn't recommend this unless you like suffering.
All my prior attempts fell about 10s short in P3 at best (~27:55) until I finally hit on a setup that really helped me keep up the pace.
View attachment 1205620
If anyone's interested and wants to try this I can post the setup I used (assuming nobody else has posted this before!), but be warned that this was a brutal no-stop on Racing Hards that also required some fuel saving.
The first couple of laps are rough sliding around on slicks, and getting out of the hairpin on lap 1 is not nice. I got taken out by the AI so many times there. Once it starts drying out it gets a lot better, but it requires constant vigilance due to pit manoeuvres from the AI and the fact that they must be aggressively passed over and over through the twisty half of the lap really doesn't help. If you end up stuck in a back-and-forth with an AI who keeps slowing down at awkward points when you're trying to make up time, it'll screw you. Oh, and the front tyres are also
completely dead for laps 11 and 12.