of course.

Virus says:
If you make them start in advance, you can't beat them.

Not if you intentionally make them slower than you normally drive so that you can catch up to them. I made this one rally map in TMUF (never released due to file size and resource usage problems) where you started in 6th place and had to work your way up to 1st (you also had to deal with oncoming traffic). The ghosts and objectives were synchronized so that you would get gold if you were in first, silver in second, bronze in third, and nothing for forth or lower. If you arrived before my personal car left the finish line to head back down the track towards the start, you would get the author medal (a coincidence as the track was validated normally)