Southwest Run is complete … made an absolute mess of it - but still good enough for provisional first on the leaderboard.
My problems:
I ran out of cap for solid 2 mins in that one annoying system 
Stuck a ship in the wrong station after a jump (~min loss)
Missed warping to a waypoint beacon and (~min loss)
Left cyno burning for too long to be able to catch up and pod self (~30 seconds loss)
Anyways … onto the next runs before the event ends!
-DPR
Looking forward to see the updated leaderboards tomorrow, I had no time myself to do additional runs, but I bet some of you guys did 
Personally, I am not impressed with the Grand Prix.
There should be some rules against Cyno usage, jump clones, its about skill and speed, and knowing routes. WH is another area I would be rather question mark on.
Lets see what kind of race one does on the track, and route gate to gate.
I ran a timed route in a Prowler which was rather epic. But that will never be counted.
Internal Tracking should note type of ship and time. There should be different categories for winning awards or honorable mentions.
I know you guys want to shave off time. But when someone literaly ends a 30min section with 13 minute on the clock that should be worthwhile. Not having someone with a Cyno cutting huge corners to the disadvantage of non-cyno users who have to brave the killzones of nullsec. [Which I am starting to think are designed to keep non-null sec players from competing in the time challenges.]
Cyno systems really sullies the challenges of the Grand Prix, and makes it a rather distasteful event for newbros and alphas and solo players who participate in the race.
Also please take internal notes on what kind of ships were used to complete the event.
Maybe next year have another Grand Prix but with different categories to race in.
Grand Prix “Blitz” Category uses Cyno.
Grand Prix “Rail” Category follows the routes or gate system.
Grand Prix “Pioneer” Category one uses WH to get to place to place
Grand Prix Categories for each ship class in game.
And the Grand Prix “Snail” category…the slowest ship to finish the Grand Prix.
But, personally the Grand Prix is kind of a mess at this moment.
I love this event. But I would love to see it have categories and a live updates on billboards.
Category one: Just a straight race for speed gate to gate.
Category two: WH/conduit space shortcuts used.
Just ban cyno, jump clones and home station death runs.
I love the event as is. What people don’t realize is that it’s not a speed race, it’s a planning and logistics race. Straight gate-to-gate would be just buy the best gear & who has the lowest ping. Not very interesting?
I like the way it is too, just some QoL stuff like letting me choose which route I wanna race would be nice. Although, I also like the idea of introducing some unconventional categories, for example battleship races. Most restrictions proposed here would just limit creativity and make the races boring.
I might do it if it was a race. Everyone start at the same time, first survivor back wins. I attended one round Pochven - it was fun.
With an hour long suspect flag. 
I’m good with that, but I’d rather you get it as you leave the first system. Would be a shame if everyone died before the race even starts.
Reasonable although they can proactively prepare with an insta-warp / undock bookmark, further emphasizing the difference between those who do the prepwork beforehand and those who don’t. 
I propose a ‘Quick-Thinkers’ round. There’s only a few hours to put your runs in and the waypoints are announced maybe two or three hours before that.
If you don’t want to use a cyno scan a wormhole in the first system then roll the outhole till its a bit further down the track.
Out of the box > obvious things.
You forgot the infinite remote home station deathclone reset category… check out Uno Turbo’s character history.
Its free to reset your home station when you switch corps as a toon under 30 days old.
Look… the rules are stated as any way you can come up with that registers with CCPs internal timing metrics. Eve is a sandbox where creativity and experience are valuable. Not everything needs to be fair (or even can be… latency differences depending on how far from eve’s servers can have an impact on which tick your command is processed, warp tunnels, system ti-di during a run, etc)
As CCP’s Permaband sings … Harden the F**K Up!
Permaband - HTFU - YouTube
-DPR
Last year we had exactly the same discussions and honestly I’m glad CCP didn’t change the rules this year. Last year (when interest in the event seemed to be higher imo) I was able to achieve P9 overall with a single jump clone and death clone per route, only using a single mid-grade ascendancy set, one Leopard and a few Ares and my character wasn’t even a year old. Of course that was already a considerable investment to take part and be just good enough to make it into the Top 10, but it proved that access to alts/bridges/cynos wasn’t necessary to compete.
This year I had an alt to bridge myself, used far more expensive Pacifiers, had cynos seeded etc and that will hopefully (fingers crossed for tomorrow lol) be good enough to improve on my performance last year.
Of course there could be different categories or multiple rulesets, but in the end the ”everything-goes“ approach will always be the purest and most-interesting kind of racing we will get in eve. Every kind of limitation leads to a different issue which have already been mentioned in this thread. Does that mean that real newbies playing for a month (looking at you Uno Turbo) realistically can’t reach good positions? Of course it does. But in eve skills, game knowledge and clever planning should be rewarded and this event captures that spirit perfectly.
It’s hard to improve much more year over year than winning the whole event 
Pending any other surprises (cough cough… Elsebeth Rhiannon SW lap) , my 3 laps were ~31:55, ~33:00, and ~39:50 … good for a provisional 4th, 1st, and 3rd and 58 total points, behind your provisional 1st, 3rd, and 2nd good for 63 points and the overall win !!!
And unlimited deathclone resetting appears headed for 3rd overall with a 6th, 2nd, and 1st and 55 total points.
Until the final standings are unveiled…only time will tell.
Best & Congrats on another fun Grand Prix season,
-DPR
For the record neither of my times so far involves a cyno.
And I’m gonna try and make a SW run but in this heatwave it is a question of who overheats and passes out first, me or the computer I’ll not do much prep tho and my infinite-reset is not Gallente so you’re safe from me (I think ;))
If you want to make another SW run then you gotta be quick GP ends today 11.00 NEST, doesn’t it?
Yea very possible I cannot make it. (And I haven’t done SW timed at all yet :D)
I wish I had the time to rerun SW too since I’m confident I can improve my time by quite a lot. All in all I’m quite happy with my times though. Let’s see if they can earn me a Top 10 spot.
I wish I had time to do any of the runs this year 
I’ll release my SW route plan when I get home, considering Uno was using the fastest method available which only works on new characters I have no idea how he was over 30 mins on that one, even without being new character I was confident I could do it in under half the time