In car rallying, Over Time Limit (universally abbreviated as OTL) is a situation where a crew has fallen so far behind their scheduled time that, in most rallies, they are excluded from further competition.
The purpose of OTL is to set a limit on crews so that marshals and other personnel involved in running a rally only need to wait a fixed amount of time after the last car was due before closing the control. Without OTL it could be very difficult to run a rally smoothly without having huge numbers of volunteers willing to wait around indefinitely.
For crews in a stage rally, OTL is a fixed limit of accrued lateness, after which one is no longer allowed to continue to compete. Lateness itself is not necessarily the result of a lack of competitiveness - for example a 10-minute roadside repair on a non-competitive section would not count against that crew's recorded stage times, etc., but it would count towards lateness. Many rallies feature special controls and breaks which allow any accrued lateness to be reset. In certain rallies (mainly road and navigational) it is also possible to make back lateness during the normal course of the event, subject to certain restrictions. Also any lateness incurred due to a decision of the organisers or force majure (i.e. an alteration of the route or hold-up) is not counted against the total lateness.
In a navigational rally or road rally then any crew which turns up at a time control OTL is deemed not to have visited it at all and penalised accordingly: either excluded if the control is a main time control; or typically 30 minutes or 1 fail for other controls.
The official expansion of the term OTL is "Over Total Lateness", although in everyday use only "Over Time Limit" is generally used.
In Australian rallying, the term "Out of Late Time" (OLT) is used. Whilst not a term used in the Confederation of Australian Motor Sport's Manual of Motor Sport (neither is Over Time Limit), it is a term used commonly on Australian rallying websites in event reports and also in event results.
Famous quotes containing the words time and/or limit:
“In time of war you know much more what children feel than in time of peace, not that children feel more but you have to know more about what they feel. In time of peace what children feel concerns the lives of children as children but in time of war there is a mingling there is not children’s lives and grown up lives there is just lives and so quite naturally you have to know what children feel.”
—Gertrude Stein (1874–1946)
“We are rarely able to interact only with folks like ourselves, who think as we do. No matter how much some of us deny this reality and long for the safety and familiarity of sameness, inclusive ways of knowing and living offer us the only true way to emancipate ourselves from the divisions that limit our minds and imaginations.”
—bell hooks (b. 1955)