While it's true that 2 minutes are added to the timer each time someone logs in, I can't see why anyone would bother to abuse this, as it's a waste of their time when they could just ask for a pause.
On the subject of the 25-26 hour pitboss clock as opposed to a "real" 24 hour clock though: it's probably worth shaving an hour or two off the pitboss timer to try to synchronize it roughly with the Earth's rotation, if teams are regularly using most of the timer (which I suspect will happen more and more frequently as the game progresses). Think about it this way: if at least one team takes 26 hours on most turns, then that's roughly an extra day of delay every fortnight. Over the course of a year, that means we're finishing the game a whole month later. So an amendment to the pitboss clock should probably be seriously considered.
In response directly to the first post: aside from obvious things like server down-time which are fine to take into account, I don't think that going by the pitboss timer is a great idea. Ignoring pause time doesn't really make that much sense, for one thing - sure teams should be able to pause the game if they need to, but you can't escape the fact that after more than a couple of days of the game being paused, people will start to get itchy feet. And just saying "sure it's been a few days, but we've only used 12 hours of
official time according to this rule" isn't going to satisfy a lot of people.
I think a much better solution would be to first amend the pitboss timer (as suggested above), and then to go with a simple rule:
Teams should try to play their turns within 24 hours of real time whenever possible. If they require more time they may request a pause of the turn timer. In this case they must endeavor to unpause and play again as soon as feasible, as well as regularly update the forum on how much longer they expect to take.
Thoughts?