Issue - Xbox controller unbinds buttons

[Pirate]

I encountered the same problem as the OP. It's very annoying, game is pretty much unplayable.
Every time I load a new race, or restart the current one, it unbinds the Clutch button. No matter what I set it to. Tried buttons, axes, keyboard buttons. Tried running as admin. I even tried to mess with the config files directly but with reverse results. I tried setting it to Mouse/Keyboard and bind everything manually, but then all axes work as buttons and it defeats the whole point of playing on a pad. I understand the clutch is meant to be an axis, but why can't I bind it to a button if I want to ?
Also why is there no way to set the pause button ? When I acidentally bound Start to something else I had to delete my entire player profile to get it to work again ! When the controller is set to XBox 360 Controller pressing Esc doesn't pause the game so I had to terminate the game from the task manager every time.