Higosh bags a triple promotion and L3 gets a second shift — the Season 8 licence board, explained.

Higosh needed an article to tell him that he was champion at Abu Dhabi. Hi Gosh, here's the fallout for you: +3.

The Season 7 D4 champion has been lifted past L3 and L2 and placed directly into L1. Five wins, eight poles and a comeback from 52 points behind earned him the biggest promotion on the board. None of it earns him a head start in L1.

That is the first argument Season 8's licences create. Higosh proved he was the class of D4. L1 asks a different question against PolyTromp, HPJones, Ussh and the rest of a field that will not care what happened two divisions below them.

The biggest promotions come with a reset button

The dry qualifying comparison gives the promotions some support across those old divisional walls. Higosh's 0.943% average sits inside the L1 pace range, but behind Ussh, Poly and HP. That justifies the promotion without pretending eight D4 poles will become eight D1 poles.

TheMDog joins him after skipping a level. Four wins in a debut season explain why IMS was unwilling to leave him in L3; his dry qualifying average says the raw speed can reach L1 too, although nearer the middle of the pool than the front. The question is no longer whether the move was earned. It is how quickly both drivers can replace command of a lower division with competitiveness in a much stronger one.

That makes both promoted stars worth watching for the same reason. Their new licences are emphatic judgements on Season 7, followed immediately by the removal of every comfort Season 7 gave them.

Rbn's place in L2 is less spectacular and perhaps more revealing. A first win at Japan was followed by a charge from tenth to second at Monza. This field will establish whether that was a two-race surge or the point at which his IMS career changed direction.

Zloober receives even less time to answer. Two starts brought two podiums and a lap-after-lap Abu Dhabi fight with Higosh that ended with a last-lap spin and a lost chance to chase the win. He now jumps from L4 to L2. IMS has seen enough to promote him; battling with Higosh for a race distance is a testament to a driver's pace.

The yellow manual placements are the board admitting that the calculation cannot do all of this by itself. HP remains in L1, kyotonic in L2 and Tullo_Formula1 in L3. John Marco and AMS_Tiago are moved upwards; HackoDK and Kartingtom go down. Schokolade is promoted into L2.

Project T.U.L.I.P. will explain the full method later. Stay tuned for the launch of another brilliant innovation by the IMS Team. The important part today is already visible: IMS has used the data to begin the conversation, then overruled it where the season told a different story.

L2 is where the numbers stop travelling

JDJT3593 has the largest PPR printed in the L2 column. It is also the easiest number on the board to misuse.

JD earned it while fighting Higosh for the D4 championship. That tells us he was extremely effective in D4. It does not make him the automatic favourite against nine drivers dropping from L1, established L2 racers and a D3 champion moving upwards. His qualifying form also raises an important question: JD's 2.063% average trails Wadz at 1.159% and jhazztan at 1.345%. He may close that gap, but until he does, gaining positions after a bad qualifying will not be as easy in D2 as it was in D4.

McBeth, Zloober, OnlineGuy99 and jazzy-draught9 arrive with the same problem. Their promotions are deserved. Their old returns were produced against different opposition.

The red arrows may therefore be more dangerous than the green ones. Tedhead spent his rookie year learning in D1. Jhazztan has already won and taken five podiums at the second-tier level. CONNOROCE has spent 31 races there and reached the podium seven times. That record tells us more about an L2 fight than a bigger return collected below it.

That is why L2 looks less like a landing place and more like an ambush. The promoted drivers bring momentum. The demoted drivers bring the experience of dogfighting in tougher divisions. Season 8 will decide which advantage counts for more.

Wadz is the warning against choosing a team from qualifying pace alone. He owns one of the quickest dry averages in L2, but across 17 Season 7 appearances he produced no podiums, lost positions overall, fell at least five places seven times and collected 11 penalty points. Monza reduced the whole problem to one line: pole became 12th.

Tullo presents the same trap in L3. He is the quickest driver in the licence group over a dry lap, yet failed to gain a place in any of his eight Season 7 D3 starts and lost 52 positions across them. The Monza collision that dropped him to 13th was not his mistake, but the wider pattern still makes him a difficult driver to trust across a season.

John Marco has drawn the hardest assignment

John is our early pick for the driver facing the most difficult Season 8.

His manual promotion puts him in L1 after a season in which too many weekends required recovery drives. Monza showed the attraction when 12th became fourth. Abu Dhabi made the point even more forcefully: 18th became fourth. His dry qualifying average is the slowest in the L1 pool, so those recoveries are not a side note. They are the job. Start in the wrong place against this field and the rescue becomes harder every week.

AMS_Tiago has the opposite problem. His dry average sits close to the established L1 leaders, and he started the Japan D1 race from pole. He finished 15th; his other two Season 7 appearances produced no points. The one-lap speed is not in doubt. L1 is the board challenging him to make the rest of the weekend survive.

MacoDelVolante at least moves only one level, but it is the final one. His dry qualifying average is strong enough to justify the move, yet cloud and demaiko were still roughly three tenths quicker by the same measure. Maco has been promoted because he looks ready. L0 exists to show how much work remains.

E3 gives L3 another hour, not merely another grid

E3 is back, but not as the old European division. It will be a second global home for L3 drivers, provisionally using the usual D4 time while D3 keeps the slot it has held throughout IMS.

That distinction changes the whole point of the return. Thirty-five active L3 drivers does not mean 35 people who can all race at the same hour. IMS is trying to organise a global field. For drivers in some parts of the world, D3's start time works. For others, geography makes it impossible before pace has any say in the matter.

One fixed D3 time could therefore leave a large licence pool with nowhere practical to race, even if a single oversized grid were possible. E3 supplies the alternate. The eventual split has to begin with who can attend which race, then we will be able to understand how the on-track rivalries develop.

That is less glamorous than declaring two perfectly balanced championships from one list. It is also how both championships get drivers on the grid.

Give us the keys: our Season 8 dream ten

The dream-team exercise needs the same discipline. We are not drafting the ten largest numbers on the board. We are picking the best drivers based on their speed, discipline and attendance. If we could get whichever drivers we wanted, these would be the ones -

Poly is the painful D1 omission after three wins of his own. JD may make the D2 selection look foolish within a few races. That is precisely the point: the promotion has earned him the chance to prove his D4 form scales upwards, not the assumption that it already has. His qualifying pace says there is still a gap to close.

The L3 choices are not an attempt to guess which drivers IMS will assign to D3 and E3. Time convenience will do much of that work. They are the pairings we would make if the drivers can take the relevant slot—proven D3 attendance and race conversion on one side, recent D4-hour availability on the other.

The board has done its job by starting the argument. It recognises Higosh's command of D4, TheMDog's rush through D3 and the simple reality that a global L3 field needs more than one viable start time.

Then the lights go out, Season 7 stays behind and everybody meets their new opposition.