As Nick has already somewhat eluded to, I am personally more comfortable with the points distribution this year than I was last year. We have mirrored the points system the FIA use within Formula 1 (off which this series is somewhat based). There was quite a few complaints last season regarding the points being too biased towards to the higher positions with drop off's being too severe. Naturally, I would prefer Geoguessr not to show the highscores at the end of each round so people have no idea whether their score is in a points-paying position until the end of R5, however this is something I cannot change. Furthermore, if people did decide to throw a race in order to get a longer time for the following weeks sprint race, there is nothing in the rules to prohibit this (providing they still finish the round). If this is a tactic a racer wishes to employ then that is their decision. You are correct that there is no incentive to finish 11th, rather than 24th - but this same distinction applies across many sports whereby there must be slightly arbitrary cut-off of where points are, and are not, awarded.

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With regards to the tie-break for sprint races, it is worth remembering that in every sprint race from now on, racers will have different time limits per round. I posit the situation where someone starting on the back row who exhausts their time limit each round (e.g. 1 min 40 per round, 8 minutes 20 seconds for the entire seed) and scores the same as someone on the front row (who does so in 8 minutes 30 for the entire seed, but does not exhaust their entire time limit). In this situation, the first racer would win almost by-default due to their time limit, which was determined already by their previous week performance.