guys, if you take one piece of advice from me, PLEASE don't race your ghosts unless they are slow ghosts.
if you are trying to literally race a ghost and it's all over you there's no way you can focus on the lap when you got yourself all over your own ass.
what i do is run a few laps and get a halfway decent ghost, then guage my progress by how bad i'm punishing it on the circuit map.
most of the time though, i don't use a ghost at all, infact i curse myself for all the time wasted running with ghosts at all. plus, if you get fast times without the ghost, i found pretty quickly that your race times will more closely resemble your free run times if you run them free of that crutch.
g'luck