I don’t qualify well enough, my average overtakes are 7 per race, last but one race went from 14th to 4th, last daily race c went from 6th to 3rd but the 2 leaders finished 30 seconds ahead of me - averaging 2 seconds per lap faster than anyone else.
surely matching should be to try and bring the racing closer, drivers of similar levels? Else what’s the point?
2 seconds a lap is pretty close. Given that there was also people behind you that were probably 2 or 3 seconds a lap slower than you I'm not sure what else you want.
but is not the point of matching to have 16 drivers of similar skill and ability where anyone can win if they drive well enough - I don’t expect to win any races as I’m an average driver at best but is it wrong to expect the lobby I’m matched into will have players of similar skill, of course some quicker some slower but when you see lobbies with spreads of 4 and 5 seconds front to back then whose that good for?
Look, ideally you'd have races with everyone within a couple of seconds of each other. Having too great a range of speeds is just unsafe for starters, and it also leads to fairly dull races as the field just spreads out. But if everyone is all grouped up too close it's also pretty bad. Most tracks get pretty unpleasant if there's a group of more than three or four cars fighting for the same bit of track.
So really, as long as there's at least two or three other drivers of roughly your pace, you're going to get someone to battle with. If some people drive off into the distance quickly, so what? You're not racing them. There's no reason to get butthurt just because you happened to be dropped into the same server with someone who is a lot better than you.
To take a real world example, look at the last F1 race in Mexico. In qualifying the Max Verstappen put in a 1:17.775 on pole. Nick Latifi, bless his cotton socks, put in a 1:21.167 in last. That's 3.5 seconds per lap from some of the best drivers in the world in highly regulated machinery. Of course a bunch of random casual drivers on the internet is going to have more variance than that. In the actual race Latifi finished two laps down, which is probably two or three
minutes behind the winner.
These sorts of gaps are not completely ideal, but they're not unreasonable when you look at how real life racing works at pretty much any level. The game matches with the players that are online, and (for various reasons) it seems like there's not that many people playing. What do you want the game to do? Create more players out of thin air? If there's only 16 people online at any given time the game has no choice but to stick them all in a lobby. There isn't some magic pool of players of exactly your skill level that the game is withholding from you. What you're getting is about as good as it's gonna get.
You can maybe pick the times you play to be when there's the most people online, but it's probably not going to make a massive difference. You can complain about this if you want, but there's really not a solution here other than you learning not to tunnel vision on winning and comparing yourself to the winners. Nick Latifi isn't winning any races and he isn't expected to. I would imagine his team considers it a great success if he manages to score a point.
And a minor success if he manages to get through the weekend without putting his car in the wall. 
