Something I was wondering about, and I figured it should be addressed; if you're in a run and you pull a bad stage, you can take some time to go back and reset that specific year for a better place. You do lose some time from it, but generally, (especially with germany, japan or kenya) it saves more time than it loses.

Should this be something disallowed or will it be allowed? I figure it should be mentioned in the rules, just in case people are wondering in the future.

I could only find an old thread about this - https://www.speedrun.com/art_of_rally/thread/r3hr3 - but as the vast majority of the top runs I've watched use it & no rule explicitly forbids it, I believe it's currently considered legal.

IMO that's the far better solution anyway (in the absence of an official seeded career mode). This way gives you a bit more control over the viability of your run, there's an element of "skill"/game knowledge involved in choosing your route (deciding whether your draw is good enough or to sacrifice 10-20 seconds to reset), and since any good RNG outcome can eventually be replicated with enough grinding, anyone has a chance to compete for top honors on even terms.

Also worth considering that not many people are running this game. If a category's standing WR has an awesome draw of rallies AND you outlaw any sort of luck manipulation, nobody's going to want to invest hours and hours of pointless running until they can luck into the one-in-a-million alignment of stars.

Yeah I agree it should be allowed, I just reckoned it might be worth mentioning because I was hesitant at times to do it because I didn't know whether it was allowed

I've got no issue with resetting your current year mid-run, in fact I encourage it to save people wasting a run that could be saved with one lucky reset. Yes, it's a gamble of about 20 seconds per reset, but it's necessary if you get a crap location.