Sim Racing aint easy and all the lap times you find on the internet are made by serious sim racers having around 1000 hours or even more of practice and setup tweaking (Around 25% is probably spent tweaking the setup). To get a grip of how much 1000 hours is consider this: 

• It takes around 750 hours of practice (3 hours per week for 5 years) to reach the black belt in Karate.
• 500 F1 races takes 750 hours to drive.
• The fighter pilots who gets chosen to go to Top Gun have around 500 hours of previous flying time in their jets.

What you need now is a wheel, everybody else has it, so why shouldn't you :o). Thrustmaster probably has a wheel with pedals for a reasonable price (around 150 USD). 

A good way to start if you're a beginner is to have auto-gear on and if available an ideal racing line drawn at the track for you to try to follow. You should be able to drive without braking help and anti-spin with just a little practice.

Try to find car setups on internet, you're welcome to use mine, but also try to understand how you should setup your car to suite your own driving style. You will probably find the fast setups on the internet a handful to control, probably having to much oversteer. To make these setups easier to drive, you can try some of these changes

• more rear wing
• less front wing
• soften the rear springs
• stiffen the front springs