Speed-based overall ranking

-- concept, we are still collecting feedback --

The World Championships consist of four races; we need to combine the results for these races into an overall score.

Ranking system based on speed.

For this edition, we propose an overall ranking system based on speed. This has a huge advantage, namely that the results are comparable across classes. For example, if your class is 'Fully Faired female', you can easily see your performance among all Fully Faired. It also has advantages for not-so-fast riders, because you can easily see how well you did in comparison to other not-so-fast riders.

Points awarded per race

• For the elimination race, you receive points equal to your speed (*) in your personal fastest lap.
  
• For the 1 hour time trial, you receive points equal to your average lap speed. Make sure that you don't skip the last round for this race!
  
• For the 20 minute criteriums, you receive points equal to your average lap speed.
  
• For the 3 hour race, you receive
  - points equal to 1.5 times your average lap speed.
  
• For the 6 hour race, you receive
  - points equal to 2.0 times your average lap speed.
  
• The Bike Courier Race is an extra race. You do not receive points for it, but we will have some nice give-away prizes to make sure that you will want to participate!
  

(*) Speed may be adjusted downward, see elimination race.

How does it work with the 3 vs 6 hour race again?
Example: If you ride the 3 hour race with 40 km/hr, you get 60 points. If you ride the 6 hour race with 30 km/hr, you also get 60 points. Conclusion: experienced riders will collect more points if they do the 6 hour.

How this was done in the past

What we have done in the past is:

• For each race, rank the results separately for each class.
• Give the first 15 finishers in a given class points according to the sequence 25,20,16,13,11,10,9,8,7,6,5,4,3,2,1.

This system has some severe disadvantages:

• If you are a slow rider, you get zero points in the overall ranking. That is a pity, because many slow riders have a few opponents that they are trying to beat, and this is not reflected in the score.
• If there are only a few riders in a category, the last finisher gets a lot of points, while for a more common category the last finishers get zero points. So effectively you get more points when there are fewer riders in your category, and that doesn't seem fair at all.

Interestingly, in the history of the Tour the France there have been some switches between assigning points based on rank vs. points based on finish time, and at the moment the two systems run in parallel.