I'm guessing each team has its own sponsor, whether they know it or not. Each team has a different reason for competing and each sponsor believes that their team's reason is the one that will make them secure the win. Love vs. Revenge vs. Greed vs. Girlpower ... I haven't got the whole thing worked out yet.

1) I think the motivation of the people running the race is going to be part of the long term subplot. To get away with it is has to be a really powerful conspiracy. Bored elites like the original Hellfire club? A wilder speculation in #3
2)All the "random" people showing up are not random. Either they work for the people running the race, or they work for the "players". (It is pretty obvious that the racers are game pieces. Each team has a "sponsor" who lures, coerces or manipulates them into taking part; There is some heavy betting going on. )

3)Maybe the great race started out along the lines of a story I read once Brek-brek-brek-Koax-Koax where world history was being decide by lunatics in an asylum racing frogs. The race is surrogate warfare. The world elites, large governments and militaries get together and set up the race as competition to avoid actual shooting wars. To avoid the whole problem that you had with the Trojan war, where the loser does not accept the results, the racers and their circumstances are carefully setup to be analogous to the actual strengths and weakness of the groups they represent. It is both the ultimate conspiracy story and also the ultimate critique of conspiracy stories in the sense that any conspiracy that produced the actual world we see would have to be a conspiracy that made no sense. Wandering off track I know a cross between fanfic and speculation. It is only to avoid really big wars WWII level or nuclear armegaddan - that is wars where the big boys take part directly on both side. Small wars, and even big wars where you don't have troops from the big powers fighting each other are still allowed. But other sponsors have muscled their way in - really powerful individuals, corporations, criminal organizations. They do this to influence the results; after all they have stakes in how the decision making go, and in real warfare would have an affect on success for failure. But also there is certain amount of thrill seeking. In addition, there is high stakes betting going on, over and above the stakes of the race itself.

In terms of keeping the secret - lots of powerful people with motivation to keep the secret, and to kill anyone who tries to talk. Undoubtedly there are plenty of rumors out there, just no evidence.

I'd be much more down with chargers being implied had we not seen 2 of the characters get the phones in the way they did.

Now I want there to have been a bit in the post-orientation scene where he gets a charger, which everyone else got at the orientation.

So based on that, we're looking at a series of races, with a defined start and finish, that have been ongoing since the beginning of cars.

Forty-two cars at Jupiter. If only one is eliminated every...so often, that's still a lot of competitors to winnow.

Oh, and fiery ball of death crashes: 1, 2 victims, if we are allowed to count flashbacks.

oh, i forgot. the baby thing surprised me too. in a good way. i was really worried about her travelling with a newborn.

whoever speculated that Kathryn is in on it? that would be awesome.

t voice of doom There is no finish. There are no survivors. t /voice of doom

I figure that's got to be the case, more often than not. I mean, if someone's getting handed a gun at the first checkpoint?

If you kill off all the competitors, limits the evidence. Also, say it's been going for 60 years -- that's, what, $1920m they've given out if somebody wins each year?

They take out life insurance on the competitors?

Bwah. Yes, and I hope Web is, in fact, running the proceedings.