From The Chair
From The Chair: Running A Fast Program
Most race programs have an insane amount of wasted time in them. Sometimes that’s the right choice, and sometimes everyone sits around thinking how long the day is going to take and how late they’re going to be there. Pace is totally under the RD’s control, and you should make sure that whatever pace you’re running is the pace you WANT to be running… not just the pace you’re letting your racers dictate to you.
Knowledge drop: racers will always self-select to run slowly. They don’t decide this as a group but individually, and most of them probably don’t like it that way. In Race 1, Racer X will need to do one more thing to their car and be late to the stand, and if you aren’t dictating the pace you’ll wait for him. In Race 3, Racer Y needs to put a screw back in after to falls out during warm-up, so he’ll run down and take his car to the pits and you’ll wait some more. Racer Z has a transponder issue, so he’s digging around in his car trackside at the time you should be starting race 6, so you wait a bit. By the end of Round 1, everyone has a feel for the pace you’re running today… and that pace is pretty slow. They’ll start coming up a little later so their tires can stay on the warmers or just because they don’t want to be early. There’s no sense of urgency. You did that. This might be appropriate for a small club race, where you will be done in a time everyone considers reasonable anyway. As the race grows, the extra time multiplies. An extra minute between races with 10 races per round and three qualifiers plus mains is 36 minutes of dead space.
From here on, we’re assuming that you want to run a fast program.
A rapid pace starts in the driver’s meeting. Tell your racers what pace you’re running today. Fast, slow, 2 minutes between races, whatever. Tell them whether you will or will not give a minute call, both for qualifying and mains (it’s traditional around here to allow a single minute call per main, only). Never, ever say you’ll just wait. Put a limit on it. If you want people to run a fast pace, use an impound table and tell people they need to use it, they CANNOT go back to the pits after racing but must impound their car and radio and go to a marshal position. You can’t start the next race without marshals, so getting them there is actually more important than the drivers. I’m afraid you CAN start without them. And they may need to learn that, too.
Your best tool is the LiveTime Timetable function. I don’t generally use the full timetable, which publishes a list of start times for each race and tracks your actual time against that throughout the day. See “actual expired time” below if you want to use it, because that is different than the countdown time. However, the Countdown to the next race is extremely useful. Set LiveTime to give you a countdown, and to call out the time remaining every 15 or 30 seconds. The cold, uncaring voice of the computer will tell people that it’s 30 seconds to the start of the race, and perhaps unlike your voice, they’ll think it’s serious about it. Don’t use the “Start Race when Timer Expires” feature, as this requires quite a lot of coordination and is not particularly useful… but DO start around the time the countdown expires, or people won’t take that seriously either.
The question becomes: how much time between races? Once you’ve got people prepped to be fast and are using the tools to let you keep things on time, you need to decide how rapidly you want to run. As a general rule, racers will go as fast as you make them go. A full heat of racers CAN transition from the stand to marshal areas and another heat CAN get on the stand with cars on the track in _forty-five seconds_ on almost any track that doesn’t have laps longer than 30 seconds. You CAN run an entire race day at this pace.
Did you catch the capitalized “CANs” in there? That’s because you should not do this… it’s just nice to know what the physical limit is. Your racers will have a miserable time and totally hate you at the end of that race day. They might even decide to revolt halfway through by not coming at all!
You’ll have to figure out the fastest comfortable pace for each track. Several things impact this timing: how far racers have to travel to get from stand to impound to marshal positions, whether there are two clear ways onto/off of the driver’s stand, how many racers are back-to-back or race-marshal-race, how long it takes to turn one lap. My tracks as examples. The Roost dirt oval has the stand access close to the track and two full paths up/down from the stand. Both car entry and impound are right at the foot of the stairs and ramp. Laps are in the 5-7 second range. This setup is ideal for speed, and I can very comfortably race with 90 seconds on the countdown timer (once I have transponders… I use 120 seconds for round 1). The Asphalt Jungle on road has both ramp and stairs reasonably close to car entry and impound, but these two stand access methods merge halfway up, creating a bottleneck that slows the race-to-race transition. Lap times are in the 12-20 second range. This is a slower setup, and a 120 second countdown is actually pushing it for round 2 and beyond.
At a race when I expect to assign many transponders to drivers in their initial races (see Why I Never Write Down Transponders), I always add 30 seconds to my target countdown timer for round 1. This gives me time for a traditional hot check-in when needed, and a little wiggle room for any assignment issues I may have. It’s nice to add this time, even if you expect to have most transponders, if some or all of the people racing are not used to running at a rapid a pace. It kind of eases them into the eventual very fast pace you’ll be using for most of the program.
Once you’ve decided on a countdown time, you simply execute. However, definitely pay attention to the feedback you get from racers. I don’t mean things they say. If many people are pulling in during the warm-up time, your timer may be too long. If, on the other hand, several people are barely making it to the stand, you might be pushing too hard.
How does this relate to actual expired time? You cannot simply add the duration of a race to the countdown timer and assume that’s how long it takes to run each race, then multiple that by the number of races per round and expect to finish a round in the resulting time. The actual time will be longer. An individual race does not last for the race duration, but the time it takes for every car to finish. We’ll call this the length of one lap in a heads-up round, because a car might have just crossed the loop when the horn sounds. Under IFMAR timing, it’s two laps, because a car could have started nearly a lap after the starting horn AND cross the loop just before their personal clock expires. Plus the time you use calling out the results. Only when you advance LiveTime to the next race does the countdown timer for that race begin counting down. So:
Time per race = Countdown timer + race duration + two laps + 30 seconds
If you run 5 minute qualifiers, have 1.5 minutes on the countdown timer, and an average lap is 15 seconds, one race will last for 7.5 minutes. You will complete 8 races per hour.
If you’re running two qualifying rounds of 16 races each, plus a mains round of 16 races, the _racing_ portion of the program will take 6 hours. If you allow minute calls in the main, you should assume they will all or almost all be used when assessing program duration… so that makes 6 hours 15 minutes.
Are you going to take extra time? Many people take extra time to set up each round, but I’m not sure why. If you WANT to take extra time, that’s fine. But you can set up a round in essentially no time at all. Race 1 could be warming up while you do it, unless you are resorting and don’t know who will be in that race. You can avoid this issue by starting off with a class that only has one heat. Finish the final race of the previous round, make the next round, call out who is in race 1, and get to it. You needn’t spend more than 2 minutes doing this, unless you intentionally want to have time between rounds. Mains take a bit longer, because the software doesn’t sort them for you. Make the mains, put them in the desired order (which may or may not go straight up the ladder, with D’s then C’s etc), tell people what’s happening first, and go. Print them and hang them – if that’s a thing you do – while the first main is going on.
The point is not that you shouldn’t take extra time between rounds, but that IT’S YOUR CHOICE. You, the RD, are in control of everything about race pacing.
One characteristic of the races themselves that heavily impacts program speed is how many people have back-to-back races or race-marshal-race situations. These folks can only get from A to B to C so quickly. While you CAN suggest or even demand that racers arrange other marshals, you might also be able to avoid doing that… and racers will have an improved experience if you can. No one’s enjoyment is increased by listening to the RD holler at people about marshaling all day. Sorting the program to control, or at least be intentional about, these conflicts and delays is an important part of race management, and a topic for another day!
The last thing I want to cover is manipulating how racers feel the pace of the program. Racer impressions are in your control as well… and there’s no greater compliment than “it really didn’t FEEL that fast!” Set expectations accurately. Run the program to those expectations. And employ this little trick. If you’re not a fast talker naturally, you really should develop the habit… announcing feels much more exciting and involving if you are saying a lot of stuff. However, you should slow down substantially when talking about the next race, who’s in it, who is checking in, and so on. Each racer develops their mental feel for speed during the intro and warm-up for their own races. If you’re not talk-talk-talk hurrying them along during this time, even if the amount of time is brief, they will not feel rushed. Try it!
This may be a topic that deserves another post in the future, but that’s what I have for you today. I hope you find something in here that helps you speed up when you want to, and control the speed even if you don’t.
Knowledge drop: racers will always self-select to run slowly. They don’t decide this as a group but individually, and most of them probably don’t like it that way. In Race 1, Racer X will need to do one more thing to their car and be late to the stand, and if you aren’t dictating the pace you’ll wait for him. In Race 3, Racer Y needs to put a screw back in after to falls out during warm-up, so he’ll run down and take his car to the pits and you’ll wait some more. Racer Z has a transponder issue, so he’s digging around in his car trackside at the time you should be starting race 6, so you wait a bit. By the end of Round 1, everyone has a feel for the pace you’re running today… and that pace is pretty slow. They’ll start coming up a little later so their tires can stay on the warmers or just because they don’t want to be early. There’s no sense of urgency. You did that. This might be appropriate for a small club race, where you will be done in a time everyone considers reasonable anyway. As the race grows, the extra time multiplies. An extra minute between races with 10 races per round and three qualifiers plus mains is 36 minutes of dead space.
From here on, we’re assuming that you want to run a fast program.
A rapid pace starts in the driver’s meeting. Tell your racers what pace you’re running today. Fast, slow, 2 minutes between races, whatever. Tell them whether you will or will not give a minute call, both for qualifying and mains (it’s traditional around here to allow a single minute call per main, only). Never, ever say you’ll just wait. Put a limit on it. If you want people to run a fast pace, use an impound table and tell people they need to use it, they CANNOT go back to the pits after racing but must impound their car and radio and go to a marshal position. You can’t start the next race without marshals, so getting them there is actually more important than the drivers. I’m afraid you CAN start without them. And they may need to learn that, too.
Your best tool is the LiveTime Timetable function. I don’t generally use the full timetable, which publishes a list of start times for each race and tracks your actual time against that throughout the day. See “actual expired time” below if you want to use it, because that is different than the countdown time. However, the Countdown to the next race is extremely useful. Set LiveTime to give you a countdown, and to call out the time remaining every 15 or 30 seconds. The cold, uncaring voice of the computer will tell people that it’s 30 seconds to the start of the race, and perhaps unlike your voice, they’ll think it’s serious about it. Don’t use the “Start Race when Timer Expires” feature, as this requires quite a lot of coordination and is not particularly useful… but DO start around the time the countdown expires, or people won’t take that seriously either.
The question becomes: how much time between races? Once you’ve got people prepped to be fast and are using the tools to let you keep things on time, you need to decide how rapidly you want to run. As a general rule, racers will go as fast as you make them go. A full heat of racers CAN transition from the stand to marshal areas and another heat CAN get on the stand with cars on the track in _forty-five seconds_ on almost any track that doesn’t have laps longer than 30 seconds. You CAN run an entire race day at this pace.
Did you catch the capitalized “CANs” in there? That’s because you should not do this… it’s just nice to know what the physical limit is. Your racers will have a miserable time and totally hate you at the end of that race day. They might even decide to revolt halfway through by not coming at all!
You’ll have to figure out the fastest comfortable pace for each track. Several things impact this timing: how far racers have to travel to get from stand to impound to marshal positions, whether there are two clear ways onto/off of the driver’s stand, how many racers are back-to-back or race-marshal-race, how long it takes to turn one lap. My tracks as examples. The Roost dirt oval has the stand access close to the track and two full paths up/down from the stand. Both car entry and impound are right at the foot of the stairs and ramp. Laps are in the 5-7 second range. This setup is ideal for speed, and I can very comfortably race with 90 seconds on the countdown timer (once I have transponders… I use 120 seconds for round 1). The Asphalt Jungle on road has both ramp and stairs reasonably close to car entry and impound, but these two stand access methods merge halfway up, creating a bottleneck that slows the race-to-race transition. Lap times are in the 12-20 second range. This is a slower setup, and a 120 second countdown is actually pushing it for round 2 and beyond.
At a race when I expect to assign many transponders to drivers in their initial races (see Why I Never Write Down Transponders), I always add 30 seconds to my target countdown timer for round 1. This gives me time for a traditional hot check-in when needed, and a little wiggle room for any assignment issues I may have. It’s nice to add this time, even if you expect to have most transponders, if some or all of the people racing are not used to running at a rapid a pace. It kind of eases them into the eventual very fast pace you’ll be using for most of the program.
Once you’ve decided on a countdown time, you simply execute. However, definitely pay attention to the feedback you get from racers. I don’t mean things they say. If many people are pulling in during the warm-up time, your timer may be too long. If, on the other hand, several people are barely making it to the stand, you might be pushing too hard.
How does this relate to actual expired time? You cannot simply add the duration of a race to the countdown timer and assume that’s how long it takes to run each race, then multiple that by the number of races per round and expect to finish a round in the resulting time. The actual time will be longer. An individual race does not last for the race duration, but the time it takes for every car to finish. We’ll call this the length of one lap in a heads-up round, because a car might have just crossed the loop when the horn sounds. Under IFMAR timing, it’s two laps, because a car could have started nearly a lap after the starting horn AND cross the loop just before their personal clock expires. Plus the time you use calling out the results. Only when you advance LiveTime to the next race does the countdown timer for that race begin counting down. So:
Time per race = Countdown timer + race duration + two laps + 30 seconds
If you run 5 minute qualifiers, have 1.5 minutes on the countdown timer, and an average lap is 15 seconds, one race will last for 7.5 minutes. You will complete 8 races per hour.
If you’re running two qualifying rounds of 16 races each, plus a mains round of 16 races, the _racing_ portion of the program will take 6 hours. If you allow minute calls in the main, you should assume they will all or almost all be used when assessing program duration… so that makes 6 hours 15 minutes.
Are you going to take extra time? Many people take extra time to set up each round, but I’m not sure why. If you WANT to take extra time, that’s fine. But you can set up a round in essentially no time at all. Race 1 could be warming up while you do it, unless you are resorting and don’t know who will be in that race. You can avoid this issue by starting off with a class that only has one heat. Finish the final race of the previous round, make the next round, call out who is in race 1, and get to it. You needn’t spend more than 2 minutes doing this, unless you intentionally want to have time between rounds. Mains take a bit longer, because the software doesn’t sort them for you. Make the mains, put them in the desired order (which may or may not go straight up the ladder, with D’s then C’s etc), tell people what’s happening first, and go. Print them and hang them – if that’s a thing you do – while the first main is going on.
The point is not that you shouldn’t take extra time between rounds, but that IT’S YOUR CHOICE. You, the RD, are in control of everything about race pacing.
One characteristic of the races themselves that heavily impacts program speed is how many people have back-to-back races or race-marshal-race situations. These folks can only get from A to B to C so quickly. While you CAN suggest or even demand that racers arrange other marshals, you might also be able to avoid doing that… and racers will have an improved experience if you can. No one’s enjoyment is increased by listening to the RD holler at people about marshaling all day. Sorting the program to control, or at least be intentional about, these conflicts and delays is an important part of race management, and a topic for another day!
The last thing I want to cover is manipulating how racers feel the pace of the program. Racer impressions are in your control as well… and there’s no greater compliment than “it really didn’t FEEL that fast!” Set expectations accurately. Run the program to those expectations. And employ this little trick. If you’re not a fast talker naturally, you really should develop the habit… announcing feels much more exciting and involving if you are saying a lot of stuff. However, you should slow down substantially when talking about the next race, who’s in it, who is checking in, and so on. Each racer develops their mental feel for speed during the intro and warm-up for their own races. If you’re not talk-talk-talk hurrying them along during this time, even if the amount of time is brief, they will not feel rushed. Try it!
This may be a topic that deserves another post in the future, but that’s what I have for you today. I hope you find something in here that helps you speed up when you want to, and control the speed even if you don’t.
