I use right stick for steering. You have to give up looking with the right stick, but for me it is completely fine, normally you don’t have time looking left or right anyway. Alternatively, you can use left analog stick left and right for steering, and right analog stick up and down for gas/brake.
It takes some getting used to, especially because in shooters all 4 axes of movement is mapped to one analog stick. But the finesse in acceleration is something you can only get with analog control, AND by separating the steering axes from the gas/brake axes.
I’ll give you my gamepad mapping for driving, perfected over the course of playing the game to finish:
LB - gear down (forget manual clutch, modern super cars are clutch-less manual anyway)
RB - gear up
LT - Handbrake
RT - Nitro
D-pad: up for horn, left and right for left and right view, down for back view (the rear mirror in the cockpit view is famously broken.)
Also map d-pad to navigate smartphone menu
Left analog stick up/down - accelerate/brake (alternatively, motorcycle forward/backward)
Left analog stick left/right - blank (alternatively, if you use right analog stick for gas/brake, this will be steering left/right)
Right analog stick up/down - Motorcycle forward/backward (alternatively, accelerate/brake)
Right analog stick left/right - steering left/right (alternatively, blank)
Also map left analog stick to navigate console menu
X - change camera view
Y - Notification (This is a system wide notification pull down button, quite useful IMO)
A - back on road (also map this for menu confirm)
B - change mini-map view (also map this for menu cancel)
Select - Map
Start - Smartphone
There are some more quirks but this will do basically.