Daniel is right, used to encounter the same problem from time to time. Stopped using autogears when I felt like changing them myself and problem went away.
103% is still not enough, because I'm usualy getting close to 1.5-2 seconds to WR and that means I'd have to put on some restriction, right? I can't say I am one of the slowest drivers outhere because I'm not. I still have my combos on which I do top laps, but the problem is that where I manage to do so, all the alien drivers are even better than usual and that's where demotivation pops up.
Point is I would be really interested in a league where all the drivers do pretty much the same lap times and most definitely I'm not the only one who thinks this way.
I tend to believe its a GPU overheating problem too. I'm having the same issue from time to time and the temporary solution is to vaccum clean the laptop. It might sound a little bit stupid, but it actually works.