To the OP Nice blog mate. I feel where you are coming from. BTW I had a nice little setup breakthrough. (Marussia F1-Sepang) I was stuck in a frustrating setup circle and took some of my own advice by switching to hard tyres and a high fuel load. The grip changes from setup tweaks became so apparent that by the time I had made the adjustments and switched back to med tyres I had found 3 sec. No I wont give a lap time...
I even won a race today in the F3.5 at Malaysia, and beat the faster guys as they made a few mistakes on lap 1, anyway, it was enough of a gap to hold them off. I think the best times are 1m44.9, maybe a few 10ths lower.
Alas, my only wish was that the original post was taken in context, but never mind. btw, as this post has been "revived" I can shamelessly plug that you should all pop over to http://ravsim.com and merrily read everything on there.