I have noticed that too, and it isnt just happen-stance of where the laps and points fall, I can get a (+0.02) for 20 clean laps on one track, switch to another series I havent run yet that week on the new track and get (+0.18) for the same 20 clean laps. I know, corner counts vary, but not by that much, I'm not talking about a road course vs an oval track, I'm talking Summit point, Watkins Glen and Lime Rock.
What varies is the laps that you're pushing off the end of your license.
SR does not track all your laps since the beginning of time. It depends on the license, but I believe it counts something like the equivalent of about 10 races. Higher licenses have (generally) longer races, so this is reflecting in how many corners the license keeps track of.
Say you're doing a 200 corner race. Say your license tracks the last 2500 corners. You run those 200 corners incident free. But your SR gain will also depend on how many incidents were in the oldest 200 corners on your license, the 200 corners that are now discarded.
If those 200 corners also had no incidents, you will gain no SR. If those 200 corners were a race when you got 16 incidents, then you will gain a LOT of SR.
The gains when you first join rookie are huge, because you're starting with an effectively huge corner to incident ratio that is spread evenly across your license. There is initially no such thing as "pushing a good race off the end of your license", because you haven't had enough corners to fill the period your license records.
This is a slightly simplified view, there is also a weighting factor that means that recent corners influence your SR slightly more than older corners. This means that actually, if you run a perfect race you will always gain at least a small amount of SR. This isn't really that important for understanding the basic concept though.
But trying to read into things like changing series, cars, and tracks is folly. That is not how it works, and it has been confirmed that this isn't how it works. Read up the threads on the iRacing forums and you'll see just how much information there is on how SR (and iRating) work. They are both very well understood, if you want to know what is happening.
There are thousands of people playing iRacing. Statistically, there will be at least a few people out there who get lucky with SR increases every time they change series. It doesn't mean that's how the system works. See confirmation bias.
Honestly, it means little to me if you choose to believe this is what's happening. I'm simply trying to stop the propagation of false information to people who may not know any better. It's a complex system that works well over the long term but is obscure and difficult to fathom in the short term. I think it's important for people to understand what's going on so that they're not disheartened by seemingly backwards results.
Over any extended period of time, SR will show very accurately how safe a driver you are. The gain or loss from any one race tells almost nothing about how safe that particular race was.
That's a serious SR Flaw I'd say....no idea if anything was done to the other driver as I wasn't really protesting him, rather the system.
