[Ilya Krivokhizhin]

Thanks so much for the feedback! Glad to hear I'm not the only one experiencing this, so it's just how the pedals work.

Whilst I understand the solutions mentioned, I find that having to press the brake so far actually reduces my control of the car. I realise I could adjust the conical rubber thing to be closer to the pedal, or simply get used to applying more pressure when braking... but when I've tried this in the past it just didn't feel very good.

If anyone's interested, I have found a solution for myself. In the control settings in AC, you can set the range of the brake pedal. Reducing this from 100% means that you hit max brake force before you depress the brake fully. This means that after having pressed very hard to calibrate the max brake point, I don't have to hit the brake that hard every time to apply 100% brake force.
This has two benefits; firstly it allows me to always be applying full brakes in the bigger braking zones (which I was sometimes not quite doing before); and perhaps more importantly for me it gives greater car control in situations where light-medium braking is useful, for example on corner entry/mid corner where weight transfer is important.

Yes, i did exactly the same (80% of pedal travel), but I assumed you did that already   as your question was kind of more about calibration itself. I think that's how these pedals work so there's no problem about it: you press the brake very hard initially to calibrate it and then let the in-game setup do it's work