Overall ranking

-- C O N C E P T --
The World Championships consist of five race; 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
In the scheme below, DNF-penalty means did-not-finish penalty. It has a value of 3.

• 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 (*).
  
• For the 20 minute criteriums, you receive points equal to your average lap speed (*).
  
• For the Dutch hill climb, you receive points equal to your speed during this 100m race.
  
• For the 3 hour race, you receive
  - points equal to 1.5 times your average lap speed minus one DNF-penalty (*,**).
  
• 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!
  

(*) If you did not complete the race, then your speed is calculated as:
((number_of_laps*lap_length)/race_duration)-dnf_penalty.

Example: you quit the 1 hour race after 30 minutes and having done 10 laps of 2.5 km each.
You get ((10*2.5)/1)-3 = 22 points.

(**) This factor 1.5 stems from the fact that by completing the 3 hour race at a given speed you have proven that you can complete the 6 hour race with at least half that speed. But since you didn't actually do the 6 hour race, a DNF-penalty is applied.

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 35 km/hr in the first 3 hours, and 30 km/hr over the full 6 hours, you get 65 points. Conclusion: most 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.