I was watching the Masters of Endurance's 24 hours race via both the live stream and LFS Remote, and seeing the mess that followed the server crash reminded me of a lot of similar situations when the grid had to be reformed for one reason or another. It always takes much longer than it should, and each time I get to witness such a situation, I'm quite glad that I'm not the admin.
It gave me a couple of ideas that I think could improve those situations a lot.
First, a "quick and easy" one: LFS Remote could be very handy in these cases if it had an option to automatically pause the playing when it loses connection to the server (instead of closing) and to keep it paused until the user presses a button to start playing again. This would allow an admin to keep seeing the timesheet and the position of each car on track at the time the server crashed. Of course it would still allow to "jump" to a given car by clicking on its name, to zoom in and out, and so on. It might also be handy if you could pause it at any point by clicking on a button (for example an admin could pause it at the end of the quali and start it again a couple of laps in the race when it's clear the race won't have to be restarted from the grid).
Second, LFS itself could have an admin command to restore the grid as it was at the end of a given mpr. By default it would use the last mpr it saved, but it should also have an option to select another one, for example to restore the grid from the last quali if the server crashed on lap 2 of the race). It would then provide two ways of restarting the race:
1. from the starting grid for a new start, or
2. from the last position of each car on track for a restart (in which case it would be absolutely great if the whole timesheet was restored too, with laps and times, like the server crash didn't happen).
In both cases LFS would put the cars on track and run the usual countdown to start the race.
It gave me a couple of ideas that I think could improve those situations a lot.
First, a "quick and easy" one: LFS Remote could be very handy in these cases if it had an option to automatically pause the playing when it loses connection to the server (instead of closing) and to keep it paused until the user presses a button to start playing again. This would allow an admin to keep seeing the timesheet and the position of each car on track at the time the server crashed. Of course it would still allow to "jump" to a given car by clicking on its name, to zoom in and out, and so on. It might also be handy if you could pause it at any point by clicking on a button (for example an admin could pause it at the end of the quali and start it again a couple of laps in the race when it's clear the race won't have to be restarted from the grid).
Second, LFS itself could have an admin command to restore the grid as it was at the end of a given mpr. By default it would use the last mpr it saved, but it should also have an option to select another one, for example to restore the grid from the last quali if the server crashed on lap 2 of the race). It would then provide two ways of restarting the race:
1. from the starting grid for a new start, or
2. from the last position of each car on track for a restart (in which case it would be absolutely great if the whole timesheet was restored too, with laps and times, like the server crash didn't happen).
In both cases LFS would put the cars on track and run the usual countdown to start the race.