Zone4 timing supports two different methods of assigning bib numbers to relay team members: everybody on the team can have a different bib number, or they can all have the same bib number.
To control which of these two modes your race uses, select the appropriate option in the relay team section of the race settings page:
If you have selected the “All team members have the same number” option, you’ll see a “Team #” field on the “Team” tab of the racer window. Otherwise, you’ll have to edit each team member’s bib number separately.
Using “Relay Bibs”
You may have bib numbers labelled “1₁”, “1₂”, “1₃” etc. In Zone4 timing, all racer numbers must be an actual number – there’s no easy way to type in “1₂” to the timing system. We strongly recommend that you treat these relay bibs as only having the large number – i.e. bib 8₁ and bib 8₂ are both just bib 8 – and use the All team members have the same number option. This makes everything easier to manage, and makes it not a problem when some team members accidentally swap bibs, which will inevitably happen.
If it is very important that you keep each team member separate, you can try to make up a mapping to convert the relay numbers into normal numbers. For example, we have used zeros as dividers, so bib 1₁ is treated as 101, 1₂ is 102. However if you are doing this, you need to be careful that you aren’t running into collisions – if you are using 101 to represent 1₁, then you can’t also have somebody on course wearing bib number 101. There is no way to automatically assign relay bibs in this way within the Zone4 software.
Assigning Timing Chips to Relay Teams
Just like bib numbers, when assigning timing chips to teams, you can choose to assign the same timing chip to all team members, or a different chip to each team member. Timing chip assignment follows the same rules as in an individual race – the system will try to match up the last two digits of the racer number with the timing chip number, and then use any non-matching chips to assign to the remaining racers.
Regardless of whether you assigned timing chips to the team or to each individual racer, you will still edit the timing chip at the Racer level, so you can always override the chip for an individual team member.