[Igor Relja]

There should be some sort of penalty during qualify session. Like starting at the rear of the field.
Contact isn't avoided as much during qualify since there's no repercussion.

I don't know how possible would that be to implement in the AC. AFAIK qualifying to race transition is automated, same as in the offline races, so you can't just move one person to the back without changing entire field.
Like Tim said, there are repercussions even for qualifying sessions. I've had two or three reports where people got 1 week suspensions for stuff they did. I'm talking going out of the pit just about as I'm coming to T1 and then just sitting at the apex, spinning out and not moving from the line even though they could, or obvious intentional blocking on the out lap. And I'm sure I could get a few more over the last year and a half.

The best thing that could be done in AC would be to either turn on ghosting during quali, or to have solo session like in R3E. Sadly, I'm pretty sure that neither of those work in AC.