There are a few strategies to use to improve your time. The most obvious one is setups. Setups are going to be more of a preference as it's more of how fast can YOU go without loosing control of the car/truck. There's really two thing to know when it comes to setups. Loose is fast, just don't make it too loose that you have to fight for control. Also each track is different. Sure you can run the same setups across multiple tracks, but each track is unique and the fastest times will have there own unique setup.

There is one other strategy that I used in Heat 2 that is still relevant in Heat 3. Race in career mode with all 4 series at once. This will allow you to get a momentum boost after the first three races. To put it into perspective I used my Chicagoland times as a reference for this. Let's say in quick race your time is 30:000. In career mode it would be around a 29:593. While it's not a lot it does make a difference that's enough to make you not get a World Record.

The last strategy works at nearly every track with the exception of smaller tracks. Go for your times in Normal Qualifying with the CPU set to the hardest difficulty. For some reason the CPU has faster times in qualifying than in Practice. Since they're spread out across the entire track you can constantly draft off of the others. Since they're set to go faster, you will also go faster as long as you're drafting someone.