Really? Does that effect AI behaviour through the whole race?
The start AI has always been crap. If you start lower on the grid, the mid-tier and low-tier AI cars are really slow. If you start from the back of the grid you can easily gain 10 positions right after the start.
I have constructed the seasons so that the user is driving the 2nd best car and gave AI best driver 100 value. This works ok because the slow start doesn't affect the front rows that much because if you're a decent sim racer you should qualify somewhere at the top.
Also giving the AI drivers aggression value anything over 25 will create erratic behaviour. 30 is already pushing it. This is of course, very much car dependant.
For example in 1988 season I gave both Senna and Prost AI 100 value but gave Senna much bigger aggression value. Prost actually outscored Senna in 1988 too... but Senna won the World Championship because of the sport's "best 11" scoring system at the time. Yeah Senna was a bit faster and blahblah but Prost was the professor and didn't make any mistakes.
Tweaking the aggression moderately created surprisingly realistic season outcome between the two as Senna drove out in two races.
There are many small tricks (or should we call the workarounds) that you can use to improve the realism. But had the devs put some very simple additions to the hardcode, they'd make our life much easier.