I'd like to bring something up. This Site gets a lot of Rally Drivers here. One thing is, those Drivers are out of others Driving ability. Perhaps, you guys should break the Drivers in to Driver Tiers per Lap Times. That way, us slow guys have a better shot at winning Stages and, perhaps the Rally itself.
That won't be done, to try to sort out some sort of handicap based on speed, would be near impossible with the difference of the rallies.
Now, what we used to do when we ran this in RBR was to grade drivers, and restrict different classes to different grades.
Grade 1 drivers could only drive for the overall positions (they could choose between whatever car, but would not compete for class positions, only overall)
Grade 2 drivers could choose between almost all cars, and they would also compete in the class that they chose.
Grade 3 drivers could not drive the fastest cars, but could drive for class points in the class they chose.
Grade 4 drivers could only choose between the two slowest classes, and would of course drive for class points as well.
Then we would also have point tables for all classes
and all grades. This grading system was simplified for the last two seasons with RBR and switched to "pro" and "amateur". But with the same theory behind it.
Now, this worked very well when we had used the same game for many many years, people qualified on previous results, and for new drivers they could choose to do a grading event or just go in to the lower class. We could also use "admin-power" and move people between grades if they showed way too high speed for a low class.
We decided against this for Season 8 for a couple of reasons, firstly, it was a completely new game, and grading from other games would be wrong to use. Also, we never thought we would get a record-high entry and certainly not well over 4x as many drivers as the previous record. So we wanted to give people the chance to drive the car of their choice.
Like I've said before, if we knew that we'd get 400+ drivers in this season, some of the rules would've been different from what they are, but while we can, and have changed some rules, we can't change the fundamentals and still keep everything fair.
Also, I am quite happy we didn't got down that "grading" route. Having almost 400 drivers to grading events and so on, would be a massive amount of extra work.
How it will be done for DiRT 4
* is a bit hard to say, as using gradings from DiRT Rally might be unfair, but who knows. I think we already have quite a few ideas for next season
*There are no guarantee that DiRT 4 will be used, but we certainly hope that it will