New Unique occurrence?

So i was doing the Lotus Eaters weekly event, and noticed something strange.
During the last race at the Waterhead sprint, instead of the checkpoint markers being the flags, they were instead the red smoke checkpoints from street scene events!
Is this just a glitch on my end?, or is this one of those rare playground mistakes that everyone who plays the event experiences?, like the solar eclipse occurrence from awhile back?

it’s happened multiple times now

looks like they just change the markers up every now and then

It happened in my game as well.

I haven’t run any of the events yet…late start for me…but aren’t the street scenes typically at night? Isn’t that why they run the smoke instead of the flags? Is the Waterhead Sprint at night? If not, then I don’t know…but it’s just what popped in my head.

Street scene is supposed to represent an illegal race. You wouldn’t have checkpoints in an illegal race. These new smoke markers might just be a design choice.

It seems to me that the devs have the ability to turn a road sprint into a street race, and vice versa if they want to for a championship. Was there any civilian traffic in the race?

No, it was like a regular race with smoke markers instead of checkpoints.

Yep -smoke