Well where were all you moaners during qualy then!?
Someone (I think Granu) did mention about restarting, and I said that if everyone agrees then we can restart, but 3 separate people said to not restart. If you want to communicate during the race then I suggest you get a mic. I know Jack1st messaged me, but I obviously won't be checking my Steam messages during qualifying.
As for the auto-retiring itself, it did happen in every social race on Thursday, so for those that attended knew it could be an issue. I personally completely forgot about it until somebody mentioned it on Teamspeak. I thought it would just be a one-off, as we didn't get it last season. No idea why we did this season.
Granted we could have restarted so that everyone knew about it, but since there is no precedent for this in the rules, all I could do is ask people what they wanted to do and you can see the result of this above. I also knew it would happen again in an y restarted session anyway.
In the future, if anyone experiences any auto-retirements during practice for a track, please post it here before the race so that everyone is aware. That is all we can do, we all know this game is pretty **** poor at this sort of thing.