[IKE]

[quote=Steve W;955850]Only one other person has disagreed with the system and I will be the second. In what world do you get/deserve awards for losing. In a game you either win or don't. /[quote]

In auto racing, the 2nd place qualifier doesn't "lose" qualifying. In the Collegiate BCS series, the rankings are based on schedule. A close loss to a highly ranked opponent is more favorable to rankings than blowouts against nobodies. Same is true of NCAA Basketball Tournament. In FSAE, the Auto-cross times are used a qualifiers for the schedule for the main endurance portion. Good Auto-cross times gives you a timeslot with other fast vehicles and at a more favorable time of day.
Qualifications are exactly that. Qualifiers. They are not the tournament, but a schedule designed to have fun, compete, and most importantly sort quality and ability for a seeding structure. A good seeding structure and algorithm matches most teams opinions of rankings. This year's seeding structure was better than most years. With a 12 matches at the FiM tournaments, it was scarily accurate.

There are two good systems proposed in this thread. Mine rewards offense and penalizes DEFENSE in the qualifying rounds. There is another using a difference metric that also rewards DEFENSE in the qualifying rounds. This really depends on what you want the qualifying to be. Both are better than the current metric.