I pretty sure you can play catch up at any point you like...
and you know know now that I think about it, what happens if there's a few fast guys using 2 or more accounts to gain an advantage in placing at the top and knocking others off the charts? Or can only one user per console enter the competiotion? Like if 1 really quick guy sets up like 10 accounts and ranks high up on all of them, I'm sure that could be an eventual problem... or are there safe guards set in place to prevent this type of manipulation??
I don't see how anyone could benefit from that, it wouldn't take long after the game was over for PD to see it was the same person for each tag and they would probably void the guy entirely or if they're nice remove the extra times and keep their fastest.
There is no situation where someone is going to set more than one of the top 30 times and so less than 30 people turn up to the finals, so why bother?
As far as playing on sub accounts yes you can. I'm playing on my other accounts so they will be able to get prizes at the end since cars from these events can not be gifted. I'm just playing on them for the cars. By the way If by some chance I'd get above 1000 in rankings on my main account I wouldn't be so rude to try doing so on other accounts but that's me not sure what others would do.
What would other members here do?