Because of how the train cycles work on a regular race, in all Yardley Station courses, the first lap is played differently (and slower) compared to the other courses. The only exception to this is probably Yardley Station Short because that course is so fast that players on the Polaris 500, Havoc Siege (a 1:1 clone of the Pola500 in stats), or Ravage 1000 can just barge through the course without having to worry about the train.

For YSM and YSL, I would suggest adding a First Lap category to reflect the different strategies used in the first lap to avoid the train. By my observations, YSM is more dependent on train strats in the first lap.

(My current YSM run shows such strats)

I’ve played with this idea before. But here’s my reasoning as to why I never implemented it.

So in ATV 2 there’s a couple of these scenarios just like this one where the the opposite happens (the 1st lap is faster by virtue of the environment). So, fastest lap could only truly be done on the first lap.

The options were either make a category for just first laps, which seems like a bit much considering that only a few of the tracks fell into that category. Or the other option would be to do nothing and simply leave the discrepancy of that 1st lap inside the 5 lap race category.

I like leaving the leaderboard as it is because it’s just a bit more clean and tidy and the 1st lap differences can be assessed within the 5 lap category.