bah don't listen. This is going to be the #1 thread to learn about the system(s).
Unfortunately I can't contribute any facts here, as we indeed know very little how the whole stuff works under the hood. But I can do some educated guesses, and maybe we can catch an official confirmation/correction or two?
About the
performance rating: I have the strong feeling that SMS did it very much like minorating. This feature was abandoned, but still quite successful and well working (so I consider SMS' way as pretty good).
Technically it took the final leaderboard after a race, and simulated a 1 vs. 1 "chess" match between ever driver pair. The sum of each driver's results is the final delta on his rating for his race. Leaving, DNF and similar will be rewarded just like IRL - end of the leaderboard (which is 100% correct, regardless if it's always fair).
There is an explanation with example on mr.com:
Code:
http://www.minorating.com/PerformanceRating
About the
safety rating: Like you already stated crashes will decrease your safety rank. Technically SMS most probably uses two different kinds of points: Good and bad. Then (I guess) they are combined either multiplied/divided, or added/substracted (don't think so). With the time we (hopefully) will learn what bad points are, currently I'd like to think it is every gray popup-signal (like contact, cut, pit exit line crossing), but for sure with different amplitudes.
The good points can be corners (iRacing), time, distance, or something else which represents "oppertunity to get bad points". In an easy approach you could simply say good/bad = X, and set different thresholds for a mapping from X to safety rank (like <1.1 = U, < 1.7 = F, ...). Of course you could also give minimum "good" requirements for higher ranks, e.g. you need to drive 500km before you can be C, and 1000km before you can achieve B (even if you have 0 bad points). I'm a bit confused because some people stated they achieved U->C in one(!) race, which doesn't exactly meet my expectations.
What is this talk good for? Well, if SMS won't tell me what the good points are for I need to figure it out for myself (and I'm sure many of you want to know as well). Beware, this is a red pill: If the system is at least ok, you'll have more fun not knowing what exactly the system wants to see. Just drive and do well, otherwise you'll feel the need to please the system instead of just racing and have fun.
To be honest, this figuring-out didn't work well so far, I can't tell anything. Minorating uses distances driven, but also dependent on the distance to the next car (=my best take on "oppertunity to make bad points"). So far I'm not confident PC2 does it similar. Hopefully they didn't pick overtakes.