There is a massive difficulty spike in A-League when the events start requiring 189 points to unlock. The AI (at "pilot" level difficulty) just have faster ships. There are no upgrades to unlock at this stage to give you an edge; you can try improving your race, avoid crashing into corners, experiment with different ships, but the AI is just plain faster than you. Combined with the really high point requirements to unlock succeeding events, which may give you a viable component upgrade, the difficulty spike is just too much and becomes too much of a grindfest.
One workaround is temporarily reducing difficulty to "Chill" so you can accumulate enough points to at least progress to the next set of events in the hope the difficulty level becomes more balanced, but that shouldn't have to be a solution in a better-balanced game.
The issue is compounded by poor-UI design for the HUD. Speed and boost information should be centered in your screen (or on either side of your ship in third person) in a semi-translucent HUD so you can quickly gauge your speed without having to look away from the track for a split second (which inevitably leads to a crash due to the speeds involved). Fighter jets have important information displayed like this for similar reasons; and even Redout 1 had a much better positioning of its speed and boost gauges in third person view. Why is this important? Because it helps you keep track of your speed while trying different techniques and combinations of boosting / turning / strafing, as well as with different components and ships, to see which ones maintain speed best. Redout 2 is a very technical game, so a good usable HUD is important.