Roadmap #2: A New Standard

In Roadmap #1 I said the DEC is built on trust, and that trust has to be earned rather than announced. This article is where I have to start paying that off, because there is no faster way to destroy a competition than a stewarding decision nobody can explain.

So let me show you exactly what happens when you get investigated here.

A Rulebook You Can Actually Finish

First, the rules themselves. I rewrote the Sporting Regulations from scratch in clear, simple English, using the old GES regulations, other major sim racing competitions and real-world championships such as the WEC as reference material.

Then I deleted a lot.

Sim racing rulebooks have a habit of collecting rules that exist purely to feel realistic. They sound professional and they achieve almost nothing, except that every one of them is another thing you can accidentally break and another thing somebody has to police. If a rule does not protect the racing or serve one of our four principles, it is not in the book.

What you get is a rulebook you can read in one sitting and still remember on Sunday.

We Judge What You Did, Not What Happened Next

Now the part that changes how it feels to race here.

In most competitions, stewards look at a crash and judge the outcome. Heavy damage means a big penalty. A light tap that happens to spin someone into the wall means a big penalty. Nothing happened? Probably nothing to see.

The DEC uses Action-Based Arbitration instead. When stewards review an incident, they deliberately ignore the consequences. Not "mostly ignore". Ignore. It does not matter whether a car spun, retired, or drove away undamaged. We judge the physical actions, the telemetry and the track position of the drivers involved. We penalise the mistake, never the luck.

This cuts both ways for you, and I want to be honest about that. A moment of carelessness that costs nobody anything is still a moment of carelessness, and it will still be treated as one. But equally, you will never be punished more heavily because the driver you touched happened to end up in the barrier rather than on the grass. Two identical actions get two identical answers, and the outcome of the crash is not part of the equation.

How A Decision Actually Gets Made

Consistency is difficult for the most human of reasons: stewards are people, people have moods, and free-text summaries let those moods in through the back door.

So the DEC app does not offer stewards a text box to explain how they felt about your crash. It walks them through a strict, step-by-step decision form built directly into the platform. The questions are objective and answerable with yes or no, like: was the attacking car's front wheel alongside the defending car's rear wheel at the point of turn-in?

From those answers, the system calculates the penalty. Not the steward's instinct. The regulations, applied by the same machine, in the same order, every single time.

The system also handles the moments that deserve less patience automatically. Contact during a Full Course Yellow or on the formation lap picks up aggravating modifiers, scaling the penalty up to a maximum of a 60-second Stop & Go.

And it draws one very hard line before anything else. The first thing the flow asks is whether the contact was deliberate. If a driver purposely wrecks someone, the review stops immediately: the car is disqualified from the event, and the driver receives a permanent ban. There is no sliding scale for that, and there is no version of this competition where there is one.

Who Decides What

Race Control is deliberately split. The Race Director runs the event: on-track safety, neutralisations, operational procedures, official race communications. The Stewards do one job only, which is investigating incidents and issuing penalties.

That separation exists so that the person managing the pressure of a live race is never the same person deciding whether you were at fault in it.

I should be honest about what that looks like in practice, though. That separation is how it works when I have the people to fill both chairs, and there will be weekends, especially early on, when I do not. Volunteers have jobs, families and the occasional desire to actually drive. If only one official is available for an event (or part of it), that person will run the race and steward it, and I would rather tell you that here than have you work it out from a decision form.

What does not change is how the decision gets made. Whether there are four officials on duty or one, the same flow asks the same questions in the same order, calculates the same penalty, and publishes the same detailed trace for you to read. The protection was never the number of people in the room. It is that none of them, however many hats they happen to be wearing that night, get to improvise.

You Get To See The Working

Here is the part I am most serious about.

When a decision is published, you get two things. The first is the short summary: the car number and the penalty. The second is the Detailed Trace, which is a complete, read-only record of every question the steward was asked and every answer they gave, in order. You can follow the entire path from incident to penalty yourself. Not a summary of the reasoning, the actual reasoning.

Will you always agree? No. Disagreement is normal in every sport, and anyone who promises you a stewarding system you will never be annoyed by is lying. But you will always be able to see how the conclusion was reached, and that is a completely different kind of frustration from the usual one, where a penalty appears out of nowhere with three words of explanation.

And if you believe the regulations were genuinely applied incorrectly, your team manager can appeal through the app, and the Staff review it. Not a plea to reconsider a judgement call. A check of whether the rules were followed.

What Comes Next

Right now this flow is being built into the web app for both in-race and post-race reviews.

Looking further ahead, I want to investigate connecting the platform directly to the RaceControl.gg system, so servers can be set up and in-game penalties issued automatically without officials doing it by hand on a separate website. And in the long term I am exploring an AI Stewarding Assistant that could help analyse telemetry and speed this flow up further.

I will keep saying this every time it comes up: any assistant would be exactly that. Human stewards make the sporting decisions in this competition, and that is not a technical limitation I am hoping to remove one day.

In the next Roadmap I will show you the platform all of this lives in.