Just had an idea on a potential way to help encourage people to race clean.

Since the game can already work out when players are getting close to an accident or about to be lapped, it seems to me it's not a huge step to also assume it can figure out the speed and direction of the cars as well.

Penalty Points
From that info, it can't be too hard to work out who was the cause of an accident or collision, e.g.

Quote from Example :

Car1 & Car2 are driving towards T1 at 80mph. Car2 takes the lead but swings wide at the corner. Car1 collides with Car2's door without even trying to brake.

That's an easy penalty to give out because it's totally impossible for Car2 to hit someone at that speed with their side (not dealing with drifting for the moment )

Variables to take into account would be:
1. Speed of impact. Faster = more penalty points. Maybe 1 point per 20mph.

2. Location of crash. Collisions on corners are expected (especially T1!), but on a straight there's rarely an excuse. Say 1 point at T1, 2 points each corner after that, 5 points on a straight.

3. Braking attempt. If the person in the wrong (in the example Car1) was pressing the brake it would have been less serious because they were at least trying to slow down. 2 points if the brake was on, 5 if it was off.

4. Damage caused. Obvious really More damage = more penalty.

There are probably some more and I'll add more if I think of them

So from that, Car1 would have been given 4 points for speed, 1 point for location, 5 for no brake and maybe 3 for damage, totalling 13 penalty points.

Reducing Your Penalty

Points would be stored on the LFSW servers and would be reduced by a certain amount every week or so. During races, you could get bonus points removed by allowing blue flaggers to pass untroubled, etc.
This way I imagine most accidental collisions would be cleared in a few days but consistent wreckers would amass points like crazy.

And The Point Is..?

A new server option would be made available to only allow access to accounts with certain numbers of points. So if you set the server up to only allow players with less than 50 points, anyone with more than that couldn't connect.

Obviously the option could be switched off for servers who want a bit of a mash up and the points wouldn't be counted if both cars have completed a race. Also, because it requires LFSW info it couldn't really be added to the demo, but whatchagonnado?

So congratulations for reading this far! What do you think? Workable? Potential? Needs some detailing but I think it's basically a sound idea that is theoretically possible.

LFS Lapper already tries to do that and it's failure to success rate is about 99 to 1 (subjectively percieved).

Vain

Best way to encourage clean racing; increase the damage and put money on the line.

isnt it either clean or racing ?

It's a good idea, and computing accidents (as suggested above by this LFS Lapper program - i've not tried it) is actually very accurate and quite simple to do, although not quite perfect as there's always a strange situation to throw a spanner in the works - but it's good enough provided the penalty is not absolute (ie: a handful of accidents dont get you kicked and banned).

Some classes though do lend themselves to mild contact, TBO racing is pretty much a contact class - you could perhaps also argue that GT cars are sort-of semi-contact. In fact pretty much any saloon class has rubbing and I dont see that as a bad thing, the problem is some types of rub (inverse to apex direction for instance) are bad, and others (ie: bumper resting) are acceptable, and that is much harder to calculate without a human brain.

Using the 4 variables there, close bumper-to-bumper races wouldn't end up giving you that many points because the relative impact speed would be low (both cars are going roughly the same speed), and the damage from rubbing would be practically zero.

But yes, there's always margin for error which would require a human to look into the situation and manually reduce the points from the account if you could upload a replay or something. But that takes time.

And of course servers that specialise in that kind of close racing could have the option to either switch the option off or have a higher number of allowed points