It's a slow process, building up the suite of skills required. But I agree with others in that the best way (in this case) is to remove the crutches immediately: both the line and suggested gear indicator should be turned off.
Then I'd suggest trying to gold every licence test. They are designed to teach you to read the road and drive accordingly. The only difficulty is the SRF being forced on, which numbs the physics and removes the precision required in a driving line (maybe get hold of an older game to alleviate that). SRF is there for people who can't follow a racing line closely, so once you get going you shouldn't ever need it again (except maybe for those few extra seconds in a seasonal...)
In GT1, there was no racing line, no suggested gear, and the licences were pretty brutal. Despite the semi-sim handling, a lot of people were put off by the requirement to adhere to a proper racing line in order to be fast. Hence the aids today.
What you will learn at first, by doing the licences, is to carefully and iteratively tweak your inputs for a specific situation (say a left-right corner combo), and that skill will be specific to that corner set: i.e. you'll have memorised braking and turning points etc. that only apply to that combo.
The more licences you do, the more combos you'll learn and you will begin to see and feel patterns - as well as learn the underlying vehicle dynamics that governs it all. This is where you will be able to learn a track's driving line by yourself, just by driving it, and predict how the car will behave in a corner, just by looking at it.
You will still be going primarily on memory, not only in terms of what corner is next and what kind it is, but also where exactly to brake and so on (per car). This is somewhat the nature of the beast at first - you cannot remove memory entirely from the equation, but at least the internal "model" you will be developing of the vehicle behaviour in your own mind can be used to get very close to a fast time very quickly.
With even more time and practice, you will develop an implicit feel for corners, and will be able to drive reasonably quickly on tracks you don't know (aside from learning the corner sequence), in cars you don't know, just by looking ahead and using that internal model. Real cars and real tracks aren't the same lap to lap, so being able to "feel" the optimal racing line (which must be some subconscious calculation in actuality) is a very important part of being very fast in real life, even when you know the track well. Shuffle racing in GT5 was good practice for this, because you would hop from car to car and had to "re-learn" the track as a result.
For hotlapping in GT, you "only" really need to get very (very) good at reproducing a memorised sequence of inputs with extreme precision, and to (magically) get errors / corrections down to an absolute minimum (to say nothing of tuning). Which takes the pressure off the unknown, including the errors and reactions to them, and gives that model a rest. That only really applies to the "aliens"; the rest of us still have to react a lot to mistakes and inadequate precision on any given lap. Of course, you still have to learn the car / track combo to get up to that speed in the first place.
Taking it still further is to try driving "blind" on circuits etc. you don't know at all. E.g. "rallying" (esp. without pace notes!), which will help you develop further your skills in reading the road, hone that internal model for more surfaces, cars and so on, as well as come to rely on a more technically conservative approach to corners (obstacles in general) that is actually much faster (statistically, over the whole course) when faced with unknown and unsighted bends than "out-in-out".
This, in my opinion, is the ultimate development of driving skill: no reliance on memory (i.e. pre-learning, practice, except the model), driving entirely by "feel", only one attempt to get each corner "right", but still
fast. It is also extremely useful even in day-to-day driving. The coursemaker in GT5 is good for this; just turn off the course map.
Above all: have fun!
:tup:
