The beauty of the 'old' system was that you could follow it without a program, it was a 'race by numbers', if no. 36 passed you ahead of no. 34 you knew no. 36 was having a better race.  Under the new system you would have to look to a program (if you had one) find both riders, note their start time differential and then work out who was having a better race - by which time another 8 riders would have passed and you have lost track !!

Perhaps a very simplistic solution would be for the bikes to show a supplementary number, so display a race (program) number AND a start position number.

Phil