Hello everyone,
Something curious arose as I looked into the matter.
I had always assumed the Escudo route would be the way to go for in rally% (without license prizes). Well, it is almost certainly still the case for PAL: Sough's new routing for NTSC-U involves using the Tigra Ice Race Car for the rally events instead, requiring less grinding than the Escudo.
Where's the issue, then? Well, in both PAL and NTSC-U, the Cultus in the Hillclimb race is beatable with the Tigra using a heavily modified setup and, obviously, getting a quick run. However, try as I might, I was unable to repeat the same feat against Escudo. As it turns out, the Escudo ghost is considerably slower in NTSC-U than PAL, rendering the Tigra route unviable for PAL.
As such, I've decided to split the rally% category for each region. While this doesn't concern most people, as beating Cultus with Tigra still requires a decent run, it is still an obvious region difference, similar to NTSC-J any%, albeit in a much smaller scale.
Good point, I've been running gran turismo 2 aspec mod and I've reallized that recently, though... Still here previous admins didn't care much about categories, rather than that cared about which emulator is slow enough for approval. I feel like rallies in ntsc u and pal got very different mechanics and could lead to unfair advantages.