A raaaaaace!
Oh this brings back memories... we used to do a lot of this back in the day. There were at least two regular racing leagues, the Sub-warp Racing Venture (SRV) which was all speed and manoeuvring in-system, and the Inter Stellar Racing Championship (ISGC, then ISRC) which was more of a rally across several systems.
Just FYI, here are the
ISRC rules from years ago.
Whichever way you want to do it -rules or no rules or whatever,- if at any point ships have to, you know,
turn, then logistics will come and bite. Track-building. You have to either set up some kind of flagpoles in space sooo precisely (for SRV) or anchor waypoints for people to touch and warp off (ISRC). We? We used to do this by anchoring containers; in some cases some may consider line judges and other stuff, especially for the start and the finish. Beware of dodgy clone-jumpers.
I am probably over-complicating this by now... anyhow, for SRV I would probably ask Julius Rigel and Che Biko; for ISRC it used to be Gyra Rho, and at some point in time Killjoy Tseng and myself organised some racing tracks years ago.
There, you are set
Q