26th is fine by me .
Do we have any idea on numbers of participants of the teams?
Everyone wants a fair race, but the trouble here is it means different things to different people, fair in your case seems to mean unmodified/natural team membership/output, let the race happen as is. Where as fair for many people here means a close race, regardless of who wins, so swapping members around etc is quite acceptable.
I lean towards a close race idea, as a
close race is interesting, but unless by sheer chance membership+output is similar between teams, it's exceedingly unlikely I think!
I don't think where one team is obviously going to trounce another, that is going to be much fun.
As far as I can see the 2 ideas for a race are mutually exclusive, but I'm up for it this year!
The other trouble it seems is estimating ppd (as a recent tense discussion in the F@H race thread highlighted), whether due to variance in what rigs the big guns can run, combined with ppd variance between F@H projects, it makes it very hard (impossible?) to get even a decently close estimate.
But were team/ppd modification be considered necessary, it could be achieved using a multiplier to one team's output rather than swapping members. After all, I think we all want to be in our own team?