Leading Time Bonus

Leading Time Bonus, often shortened to LTB, is a competition rule often implemented in contests with long (three or more weeks) races. Essentially, it consists in rewarding drivers who succeed in staying atop the current race scoreboard for significant ammounts of time with extra championship points. The rule was pioneered by ZakStunts in its 2002 season with the main goal of countering the effects of time hiding, thus making for higher drive activity on the early and intermediate stages of the races. LTB proved to be quite successful in that respect, and so it has been adopted by other competitions ever since.

Over the years, LTB was applied in a number of different ways by contest managers. The classical approach, traditionally used in ZakStunts, is to reward LTB points to the two (or, at times, three) drivers with the largest number of leading hours during the race. In UnskilledStunts, all racers were awarded LTB points on reaching specific thresold values of leading hours. A third approach, seen on SDR 2007 season and ISM 2008 edition preliminary stage, was to define weekly checkpoints within a race and give LTB to the first and second placed drivers on each checkpoint.