Quote Originally Posted by focus206 View Post
You are talking about fans who go watch the event live for the weekend, which are a fraction of the fans who are following the event remotely - and the first contact that a fan has with rallysport is almost always from far away, especially in this day and age. You usually won't go from barely knowing rallying to spectating a WRC event in the blink of an eye, there's lots inbetween.
New fans or fans that are not so passionate (yet) to go to a WRC event will instead rely on highlights (almost non-existant, which is a problem), free coverage to follow some stages and have an idea how WRC works (non-existant, which is a problem) and All-Live. And I guarantee they'll ask way more often "Why only 8 cars in the top class?" than "Why are drivers going slower in the last stages of the rally?", if they can even notice drivers going slower, that is.
Hence my point: you "solve" this Sunday cruising problem and you'll see little effect on the fanbase. More people stay on the stages on Sunday morning? That's not much at all.
It's not that hard for new fan watching on rally.tv to realize if midway through the rally, gaps between drivers became safe enough to not push. Even commentary and post-stage interviews don't hide it.

And it's not like only viewiership of new fans is affected. Not all old fans are so hardcore to keep watching sunday, if they think results are pretty much already decided and expect sunday stages to be uneventful cruise.

New point system is improving that issue quite well. It created rally winner points issue but it's not that hard to make extra rule to solve that problem.