I'm the host of this league and I know that we had 16 drivers in that last race. We had a manager join before the qualifying had finished so that put us at 16
I just took a look, though I don't have access to an events log for joining/leaving leagues, however, I can see there were 4 players promoted from Rookie, and then 'Carlos Ramirez' joined the league but wasn't permitted to be a part of the championship for the Abu Dhabi race. This explains why the promotion zone wasn't active.