There's like 60 seconds (12 x 5s) to save just by taking jumpstarts instead of waiting countdown out. Is that allowed because isn't RTA just doing 12 stages in fastest way possible?

All the other rally games follow the 5 second countdown so I'd assume its a community based thing to follow it. Though I am looking into loading times as an issue as theyre not consistent between users.

Well in Richard Burns Rally [2004] u can jumpstart too, but u are only allowed to do it three(or two) times per rally. After the forth jumpstart(or 3rd) u are forced to retire the event.

In Dirt Rally u can jumpstart all the stages and u only get 10s penalty/stage which is added on the stage time, anyway those times doesn't matter in RTA. It's little bit problematic because then every stage start needs to be checked that there's no jumpstarts. Sometimes it can be difficult to tell if u jumpstarted when there's no text showing up on the screen to tell u that (when all hud options are set off). Maybe the in game timer should be forced to be on. From that jumpstarts can be spotted when that +10s penalty time is added to the stage time immediately. I think Cortextuals Dirt Telemetry Tool that I have on the stream shows the timer with penalty time added, not sure though need to check that.

For me initial load from custom event resume button press to menu screen with setup and shakedown options takes 15s and load time between 1st and 2nd stage is 17s. I have the game installed on a sata3 HDD (WD Caviar Black 1TB), 16gb of ram, gpu has 3gb.

edit: your loading times in Finland are 35s from Resume to first Menu and also 35s between 1st and 2nd stage, so they're much longer compared to mine. Do you have game on a sata2 hdd or does even that explain the difference? I calculated that u lose 20s at the first load from resume and then 11x18s between stages so in total 3min 38s.