For new players starting now its extremely hard to win duels. If you go to Elite league 1 with a basic car, opponents have 4-6 seconds advantage just going straight. Even when you think you won around 2 seconds up, they have such a fast car on tracks like Shanghai or Spa, they will just drive into you so you lose. 800-1000 rated car vs 2000-2200 is unfair imo. I have seen players win duels going off track every corner just because there car made around 5 seconds going straight. I think they should limit the players to play against players with similar performance. Also this constant cheating when players take players out on sharp slow turns after a long straight should instead DNF the other player. Another suggestion is the player who is hit from behind at speed cannot get damage. I suppose only flaw would be players who made a mistake and have a slowdown and try to block other player would make player going to overtake unfairly penalised. There must be some solution to this. Maybe in duels you can't hit players with your own car.
I lost 4 duels today when other player just used my car as a brake and punted me out the way after being too far behind. I think players who hit from behind at a speed that is not normal should be penalised. I get that blocking is part of duels so I don't have a problem with that unless you do it when you make a mistake with huge difference in closing speeds. Its the constant duel losses after driving near perfect when you get taken out that is most frustrating. In real-life you would get disqualified, in this game players are rewarded for it.