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 amounts 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 higher 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 threshold values of leading hours. A third approach, seen on SDR 2007 season and ISM 2008 and 2009 edition preliminary stage, was to define weekly checkpoints within a race and give LTB to the first and second placed drivers on each checkpoint. A fourth approach seen on ISM 2009 edition final stage was to define a daily bonus time for every driver who realizes a new leading time; this 4th way to apply LTB was regulated by some rules (mainly only one bonus for driver in every day) described on ISM 2009 Info&Rules page.