What'd the best strategy to adopt when starting out - To stick with one circuit and learn it thoroughly or switch around to get broad experience of them all?

My preferred car is the Formula XR at the moment because I'd like to get good enough to be confident driving the Sauber (wouldn't we all?). I'm mainly practising the South City long circuit but is there a better circuit to learn single seater racing on?

i'd say its best to stick to one circuit untill you get within at least 3 seconds of the world record. then go hop around with different cars and tracks. come back and try and get withing 2 second or 1 seconds with the experience you've gained from driving other cars and tracks.

the most important thing is to learn how not to crash into other people or go off the track.

Aston club is a very easy track to learn. i also like kyoto national.

I find Westhill is a great place to practice the SS cars or the longer Aston configs , I wouldnt try for a specific time just try to get consistant laptimes first .

Hitting Shift F to hide all screen clutter can help alot too, makes one concentrate on the driving and the lines.

after you have become bored with one config sometimes switching to a different track/car and then coming back to the original config can make for faster times .

download the WR replays to see the best lines to take and try to drive those lines slowly increasing apex speeds each lap if you can.

SD.

When you only know one track/car combo you'll have a quite hard time learning to understand the physics. Simracers can't feel what is happening to the car so they need to understand the car even without all the necessary information available.
When I began with LFS I chose FZ5/Aston National as a starting-combo, which was a mistake. But as a much bigger mistake, I did about 500 laps of that combo (laptime: ~ 2 minutes) before I tried a different one. And my pace didn't make *any* progress in the last ~250 laps of those.
Later, when I came back to that combo over half a year later I reduced my pb on that combo by nearly 2 seconds within 40 laps.

The morale of the story:
Move to the next combination whenever you can't improve anymore. Also try other cars. The experience with other cars will help you to understand the FOX better because a broad experience helps to get a hold of the physics that run behind the scenes.

Vain

GTR blackwood is another popular one although gone out of fashion a bit now.

What ive done is - raced gtr blackwood alot, slowly knocking hundreths of seconds off changed to other combos but always came back to gtr bl1. Slowly i drove the other cars just so tha i got a feel of them and most tracks also to get a feel of them. example, drove few laps of south city and i dont like it at all really as one mistake and 99% time wrecked car where i love the challenge of trying to control a car after making a mistake. You might be different but find some car/track combos u like and practice them

It is also obviously a good idea to be reasonable at the popular online tracks so you can have some good online fun.

I was racing/hot lapping AS1 quite a lot in the FOX. It was not until I raced the slower than turbo cars on the longer FE rally cross track that I just went in and beat my previous laptimes out by over half a second. I think it was the improved skill of keeping the car not sliding in mid corner that did it... You never know where you learn valuable experience...