Several times on CTRA servers, I have witnessed the following:

There are around 14-15 drivers on the server.

The track changes.

One driver hovers over the "join grid" button, clicks it as soon as possible, then immediately clicks Ready. Because he's the only one on the grid, 100% of the drivers are seen to be Ready, and the race starts. He's the only one there. One or two more drivers manage to join before the green lights, resulting in a race of three cars while the other 12 or so are forced to spectate.

This is simply unfair. Irrespective of how many drivers have clicked Ready, the game should allow a small amount of time for drivers to choose a setup and prepare for the race. 60 seconds seems more than adequate.

The best thing I can suggest, for now, is to state what happened and state your objection into the server (thus into the replay file), ask anyone else who feels the same to do the same, and file it. Wait until the first sector of the 2nd lap, join and start a vote to restart along with everyone else.

Eventually, I'd like to see a minimum restart time setting and also a maximum end screen timer, so that everyone gets a chance to pick a setup and if people add themselves to the grid but don't click go within a specified time, they're removed from the grid automatically and the server starts the race.

Quote from SamH :

Wait until the first sector of the 2nd lap, join and start a vote to restart along with everyone else.

I've tried that before and gotten absolutely no response. It seems to only really be an issue on SS1 and Race 1, in which there are many drivers who simply aren't aware of issues like this and unintentionally start the race too soon. On the higher level servers most people know what's going on and are careful not to Ready up too soon, so this situation never occurs in the first place.

Quote from SamH :

Eventually, I'd like to see

What do you mean? Is it currently impossible to implement such a delay?

Yes, although there were talks before of having the first... 3 minutes (or maybe 3 laps) length of time being set to practice, where then it'd set laps and restart, using the best practice times as grid positions, which I think would be a good idea TBH.

Sam, What you could do is make a little while loop or something after the track has changed. Then get that loop spinning and each time it goes through send a "/clear" at lfs, Maybe every 500'th of a second or something. that would solve it in seconds.

Edit: Theres acutally another way too Sam. Make a little bool, When the track has just changed set it to true. Make a little timer that starts after track change to make the bool false again. then check on join in the NPL packet, if false, do nothing. If true, spec

You guys are so lucky.
Often (50/50-chance) my LFS lost connection to server after track-change.

Quote from VoiD :

You guys are so lucky.
Often (50/50-chance) my LFS lost connection to server after track-change.

Happens to me too, these days. It never used to, but it started doing at Patch Y.

I think it's CPU related, because my PC never does, but it seems single-core PC's do time out a lot.

I don´t think so. Socket 939 X2 4600 @ 2,8 GHz should be more than enough.