The two rule changes I would make is that at a bunching point, the first team leaves immediately, the second team leaves 10 min later, etc. At airports leaving is in the same order as they arrived at the airport they left from. Not only does this reward teams showing up early but also prevent teams from blindly following each other - unless of course you want to wait around for your friends.
The other rule is is you give out the answer to a puzzle to another team, you are penalized 30 min. If you look at another team’s work (like the surfboard where one player looks at the picture on the other teams board) you are penalized 30 min.
As for the Uturn, can you only use it once per season? I think there is a strategy to not using it early on. Why would I want to use it when I’m far ahead when maybe I could use it in a later leg when I’m in the middle of the pack?
For one thing, that would be the opposite of bunching. Bunching gives an advantage to the trailing teams, this would give a similar advantage to the leading team(s), and I’d rather see each team run its own race as fairly as possible.
In a way, the needle-in-a-haystack challenges already reward the leading teams. If there are 10 gnomes hidden in a hundred haystacks, the first team to look for one has a 1-in-10 chance each time. But as teams find them, and leave, the odds usually get worse; the last team might have 1 gnome left and 25 haystacks to search. Even worse are the ones like the bucket-of-sand task from earlier this season. The teams had to rebuild each sandcastle after they searched it. Trailing teams wouldn’t know which castles had already been checked. They might have 1 clue in 100 sandcastles.
Plus, and I’ve said this before, people conspiring to find the perfect way to stab someone else in the back is why I don’t watch Survivor. I’m not looking for TAR to make rule changes to make it easier to do the same thing.