Perhaps I’m simply misunderstanding the rules of circuit races. Anyway, last night I was goofing around on an online circuit race since there was only one other player in the session. We stopped just before the finish line of the final lap where I then turned around and did one lap traveling in the opposite direction of the course. When I crossed the finish line from the other side I was surprised to be awarded 1st Place – I would’ve assumed that I’d either be DQ’d or that my lap count would’ve decreased by one. Apparently the game treats lap counts as if they were absolute values. I dunno. . . I haven’t bothered to read the official Horizon Rule Book so maybe these sort of shenanigans are totally within the spirit of the Festival? 
The programming probably only measures distance in hidden checkpoints, so you crossed all of the hidden checkpoints.
I don’t know if this works in online as well but I made a custom route and if I set it to one lap I can just turn around and drive back through the finish line and complete the race. Granted my route has no checkpoints… -_-
*@AquaPainter168: [/h] ***Yeah, I guess the game only cares about checkpoint crosses and not so much about directionality. The other day I did an online street race where my car went off the road and overshot the final gate. I DNF’d because I was trying to reposition my car the “correct way” through the gate but couldn’t do so in time. Now I’m wondering if I could’ve just crossed it from the back since that would’ve been the quickest way through it? I’ll have to take a look into that possibility at some point.
*@SoloTwo42: [/h] ***I would assume so because I was in an custom online race when it happened. So based on your experiment, I think that if you had one checkpoint less than half-way through the course from your starting position, then it would be quicker to just cross it and head back to the start line than to do the entire race.
If you got all the checkpoints except the last one (the finish line), then you’re able to enter the finish line from either direction. However, if there are any other checkpoints still available on the map aside from the finish line, then you cannot finish the race while driving the opposite direction.
So checkpoints do account for directionality then? That would make sense because it would preclude the possibility of doing an entire race going the wrong direction, and would always result in a loss for legitimate races because you’d have to travel an extra length of the course just to cross the finish line from the other side.
My apologies, let me clarify a bit: You can enter any checkpoint (including the finish line) from any direction and it will register as if you’ve driven through it like normal (assuming you don’t get rewound/reset for going off course). With that being said though, the checkpoints in each race must be driven through in a certain order for them to register. For example, you can’t cut the course and drive into the finish line unless the last checkpoint before the finish line has been driven through.
Ah! Got it! Thanks for the detailed explanation – definitely good to know! In retrospect, I guess I should’ve crossed that final street race gate from the back. Ugh. 
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What PG could do is is divide all checkpoints into 10 hidden sections so that the distance is much smaller. Then you would have to travel through 10 hidden checkpoints just to cross 1 visible checkpoint. So if you tried to turn around the counter would not reach 10, and the game wouldn’t let you end the race, although if you got very near the line at the end of the race it would… which is OK.
I think that PG simply borrowed the checkpoint system from sprints and applied them to circuits. I just happened to stumble across an anomalous case that would only apply to circuit races because the start and finish lines happen to be at the same physical location. @KBowTuning’s explanation of how checkpoints work actually makes a lot of sense as to why PG didn’t need to change anything, because it wouldn’t be advantageous for anyone to race through all the checkpoints minus the finish line and then do a lap in the opposite direction. And this will always hold true for properly designed circuit races with checkpoints that are spread evenly throughout.
For me this experience was a bit of an eye opener because I always pictured checkpoints as gates that needed to be crossed from a particular side. An analogous way to look at checkpoints is to think of them as bases on a baseball diamond – you just need to tag them all in sequence. (The only exception being that in baseball you wouldn’t be able to score a run from third base by way of running back through second and first base in order to reach home plate. )
I suppose that I also could’ve finished the race by driving around the grandstand and tagging the finish line from the “starting side” of it, instead of running an entire lap the wrong way. Circuit races typically have some natural barriers that force you toward the next checkpoint so I never really thought too much about the mechanism behind it when racing. But it’s definitely a handy detail to know in the case of missing the final gate in a street or sprint race! 