Lets analyze what worked well, and what could have worked better.

Fire away.

I think the weight penalties were a good idea But to be honest I didnt like the idea of the inverted grids. Even though I benefitted from them on a couple of starts I would much rather either qualify or line up in order acording to points but not reversed.
The pace car was also a good idea as it helped keep the racing close but we need to be more disciplined on the restarts. The way it went on the final race was that full course yellows tended to bring out a second and even third full course yellow on the restarts. Maybe that was just because of the nature of the first corner at the Norisring but I think its something that needs some thought? other than that, I think it was pretty good all round.

From my perspective (and I may add to this as things come to mind):

1. Mod selection: Fantastic. Hard to beat those cars for challenge and excitement.
2. Track selection: Good, with a wide variety of track types to keep it lively. But as is often the case, the most fun (technical) tracks to drive often don't produce the most exciting racing. Brands is a wonderful track to turn laps on, but it's a bit of a parade as far as racing goes (my opinion, anyways). Norisring is terribly simple and repetitive, but produced some good racing overall. Ditto for A1 Ring. Where the fun factor breaks down for me is when the field spreads out and it becomes a bit of a solo practice session. Some of our race venues I got pretty lonely out there, with the leader off in the distance and the next car trailing behind me, feeling a lot like a practice session rather than a race. Finally, this selection of tracks worked well because they have lap times between 45 and 90 seconds. Longer than that is too boring, shorter would be just repetitive.
3. Weight penalties: Good, but could have been even more aggressive in add-ons. That's a tough one to gauge, but I think Darren and I could have had more weight added.
4. Race format: There are differences in technique between sprint racing and longer races. I liked the split with a multi-feature race day, some being sprints and others longer races with pit strategy. Better, IMO, than just one race.
5. Points system: Great. That worked well.
6. Inverted grids: Personally, I really like those. It forces situations where you have to work through traffic. Guaranteed mayhem to be sure, but all in good fun. Saturday night dirt-track racin' in the USA sometimes features inverted grids, and they are just as exciting there.
7. Two-class Racing: That also worked out well, although it might have been a bit of a detractor for Papa_K and Pumbaa to bring limited points over from the Orange Mercs. More weight penalties for the initial Smurf crowd might have helped that.
8. Safety Cars: Overall, I liked the way that kept the racing close, as it does in NASCAR. Probably worth tweaking for future races, as there were some odd things about it. As I recall, the real Daytona 24 this year also had many safety car periods, so that sort of thing is not unprecedented. We'll have to look into the Safety Car criteria and see if we can tweak it a bit, as they came out pretty easily at Norisring. But overall I liked the aspect.

Some thoughts for further discussion:
1. Feeder Series: Some race weekends feature lower-tier racing in addition to the main series event. NASCAR Sprint Cup has it's lower-tier Nationwide Series race on Saturday. There's the Porsche SuperCup at F1 races. Things like that. What if the first race of a Sunday was a short sprint race with a different class of car, something lower-powered and simpler to drive?
2. "Team" Racing: We had orange and blue, but they were in classes of their own. What if we had a series with, say, three teams of about a half-dozen drivers each? Each team would collect points, with the teams average score being your weekend tally towards a championship. We'd distribute drivers between teams to balance the experience levels.

One thing I'd disagree on is the mod. Overall, I'd avoid using that one again.
It's a mod that requires excessive understeer to avoid snap oversteer -- That is/was a common feature to some rFactor mods, especially earlier. To me, the Auto-Spin (tire physics?) trait seems more like an Expert Gamer Mode, rather than added realism. This wasn't the poster-mod for Auto-spin, but it showed itself at some tracks more than others.
(Other mods with auto-spin? I heard mention of Meganes in the possible future. The early/popular Megane mod version was on rails, maybe with too much grip, until it fell off the rails... until the rear tires let loose at all, in any direction -- Then it was Frisbee-time.)

If used, weight penalties by overall results would probably be better IMO. (And: Were these really two classes?)
(Other Alternatives: Two Different classes of cars, e.g. GT1 and GT2. Weight penalties could be applied in each class (or not)... or advance to GT1... or devolve to GT2... etc. Is the idea to keep everyone close on a road course? That would lead to... good things? No definite opinion either way on that one. It COULD be good or bad.)

Overall points could probably be based on overall results. (Another pain-in-the-butt set of numbers.)

On the whole i think it was a big success. Like Chunx I loved this mod, the cars certainly take a period of adjustment but after that they are great fun and i had a blast driving them. Track selection was good, i know the plan was to keep it close to the real series. Some worked better than others and despite being completely bonkers, Norisring was an exciting finale In future I would suggest diversifying away from the real series tracks if needed in order to find others better suited to the cars. Mind you, these things are not often apparent until it's too late so you never know what's good or not until you try it.

Weights were good in principle but with hindsight they should have been applied more aggressively, probably on a per win basis. The variety of races was great and balanced just about right and i loved the fact it was slightly different for each event. Personally i'm not a fan of inverted grids or sprint racing but that's just personal preference. I concede it's good to have a balance.

I'm undecided about the two classes. With hindsight both PK and Pumbaa should have been blue from the start so any detractor was largely self inflicted, but I have a feeling that performance based weight penalties across a single class would have worked better.

I thought the safety car worked well, yes there were a lot of yellows but that wasn't the safety car's fault - it was us lot repeatedly crashing into each other at the restarts.
Might need a little fine tuning but the principle is great, especially on 'nascar'ish circuits like Norisring. I'd love to see it make an appearance at 1 or 2 races per series.

For the future - well touring cars are definitely a very popular genre but the DTM seemed to be a bit of a love/hate thing. Maybe something less edgy like the new Meganes, Clio Cup or BTCC would go down well. Personally i'm looking forward to the V8 unleashed mod.

Like Chunx, i'd love to see a team based series. 4 or 5 teams with 3 or 4 drivers per team. If driver abilities were evenly distributed then you could either combine points for each team or take an average finishing position.

It was great series I think.

I only did two events of the series so I am not much qualified to have opinions but... as Doug was so kind to credit me for initial idea... here I go:

single class/multiclass? -> single class

Single class is how I was imagining this. My path of thinking was to bring levelling element to offset material differnces of raw speed diferent drivers represent. IMO it can be acieved by two ways:

(1) choosing 'historic' kind of mod (like F1 1990 for example) and allocating slower/trickier cars to most talented drivers and better/easier cars to average drivers

(2) choosing 'spec/league version' mod and differntiating cars' speed by weights, this is trick actually used in many series (GT, WTCC) to level cars, but we would use it to level drivers...

Both methods work well. IMO (2) is easier to manage while (1) can be more exciting, in terms of using historic mod


reversed grid/qually based grid? -> qually based grid

A reversed grid is a bit too much depended on luck factor, especially with limitation of online simracing. I appreciate fun that quick drivers have in those races, when they feel like fox in the chicken house, but incidents can be costly for botn sides. I have to admit, being an average driver, those races are not enjoyable for me. I have to spent more time looking on rear mirror than looking upfront, when being constantly 'harrassed' from behind ;-) Fun? Yes. But none when I know that mine and yours championship points are at stake. And it just gets some 'arcade' console spirit... IMO

Solutions:
(1) let's have short reversed grid races as opening warm up event with no series points awarded
(2) let's use it as 'qualifying race' for grid position for feature race
(3) let's use it for long races when luck factor can have less impact
(

safety car/no safety car? -> no SC

I don't like it real world, neither I like it here. In road racing they are always causing debates and no it's hard to make it better in simracing

teams/ no teams -> No

There's enough bad blood in real world racing becasue of team orders and drivers being critized for going in the way of someone for team benefit. Let's not bring it here. I would rather be voting for few drivers per car option if we want to go for longer endurance races

feeder series -> yes

this is actualy nice idea to drive the track first in something slower before moving to feature class and this would nicely replicate what happens on real race tracks every Sunday

tracks -> the longer the better

Size does matter for me here. I agree with small grids it can get boring, but I will always choose 20 corners taken 20 times, than 5 corners taken 80 times per race.