With so few stages and requiring so much practice, how about having "official" races every two weeks?

We surely will in the near future

Hate that idea. EVERY WEEK!

Fortnight - weekly's ok when you've got the technique down pat, but 6 stages is just too much in a week for a newbie to the game.

My feeling on this - Rallying is not the same as circuit racing. You aren't supposed to drive the "track" over and over until you have it memorized.

What makes it fun for me is driving it just enough that I am not surprised by the tricky parts - this is necessary since the pace notes are so bad - then doing the stages with a bit of seat of the pants driving.

I know that there are going to be lots of people that will spend hours doing the stages repeatedly until they know every corner, but that doesn't mean I want to encourage it ;)

"My feeling on this - Rallying is not the same as circuit racing. You aren't supposed to drive the "track" over and over until you have it memorized."

My thoughts exactly. Practicing every stage over and over is against the spirit of rallying IMO. If it wasn't for the piss-poor co-driver I wouldn't even think of driving each stage more than once for practice (even real rally drivers get a practice run on each stage though).

When I competed at WIRC I think I remember that they never announced which stages were going to be run so it would be a suprise to everyone, especially as they also had the all tarmac, all gravel and all snow mods enabled, so the next stage could be any stage from RBR in any road condition, so it was near impossible to know the stage they would be running.

Practicing over and over is against spirit of rallying, that's true. However, real life drivers not only have extensive recce (recon for Yanks), but the stages are also mostly driven on roads that were used before, not to mention how much more experienced RL guys are. And the pace notes are more adequate.

So, it's a ballance of things.

Over at Blackhole there are plenty of updated/improved pace notes to download, if I recall correctly (there site is down right now so I can't verify it). But I have seen numerous updates for the pace notes on various sites.

I am with David and Scott on this one, practicing all week, then checking on current times, then practice some more untill you are beating them times, and then in the last few hours do your 'official' runs seems a little 'un-rally' like for me.
Maybe making the times visible during the practice for anyone who wants to post them, and then shut down the live scoring while the event is official, and only release them at the end when all is said and done would be a better way to go?
My 2c worth on the subject anyway.

Shut down live scoring during the event? Even real life racers see/hear the live timing, before, during and after their race. I like the idea of racing every weekend, but think the live scoring should be left as is.