Follow one car
Choose any car, ideally in the middle of the field, and stay with it. Coverage will keep pulling you towards the front, but the middle is where you can actually see progress being made and lost. Within twenty laps you will have a sense of whether the car is improving, and you will have learned to read pace without commentary telling you.
Watch the gap, not the leader
The leader tells you little. The distance between first and second tells you almost everything: whether tyres are holding, whether the car in front is in trouble, whether a stop is coming. A gap growing steadily is a car in control; a gap oscillating is a fight in progress even if nothing dramatic is happening on screen.
Use the cautions
Each caution is a natural chapter break. Ask one question during it: who is better off than they were five minutes ago? Answering that repeatedly teaches strategy faster than any explanation, because you are reverse-engineering decisions from their consequences.