There's really no way the custom show can function as a meaningful real contest for livery designers anyway, as your car is in there for so little time when it first appears. I'm not sure exactly how long it is, but it's in the region of 5 minutes. I've seen it claimed that if your car gets no votes in that time, it will never appear again. The number of people who will look at it in those 5 minutes is tiny, so the only way to get a decent number of votes is with a co-operative pool of people who all vote for each other in that 5 minute window, like the pictures show.
We could create our own group here, but we're split across the platforms. One reason I got another copy of the game was to be able to vote for myself from another account in that 5 minute window.
One thing I tried on the other account this week is to get platinum in the summit with only green parts and without using legend points. I also had very limited cars, so I was doing the feats with an ST2 car that was at 750, and my plane and drift car were nowhere near max performance number. It was extremely hard to get platinum like this, I scraped into the top 10k but probably wouldn't be there at the end. Just using 15 legend points for skilled and hothead or slippery, whichever one the max multiplier is, made a big difference, and I'd probably stay in platinum with the extra points from that. TBH I'd say there's really no reason for even a new player to try to do the summit like that, it's very easy to just get skilled on a few pink parts. With pink parts and 40 legend points to get full skilled, I was in the top 2k.
I've enjoyed some of the events a lot this week. The clean racing time trials are really good, and I particularly enjoyed the one with the drift car where I got into the top 10 on the leaderboard. Manual gears make a big difference for some of them, e.g. for the ones with Scotto's car you get past the AI massively faster at the start with manual gears vs auto, making it much easier to keep the full clean race bonus.