Uploading Racers
Select the “Time Limit” template on the Create a Race window:
And then select the “Upload Racers from a CSV” option. The full help page for uploading racers from CSV can be found here.
The CSV file should have a column called “Team Name” to identify the relay teams, a column called “Race Type” to identify whether racers are in the 24hour or 8hour race. Each row should be an individual racer, and all the rows representing members of a relay team must have the exact same value in the “team name” column. Racers who are not part of a relay team should have the “team name” column blank.
Creating Teams
Under the “advanced settings” section on the race settings page, turn on the Enable Relay Team Grouping option and set the Team Field to be “team name”. Ordering is not important if the racer numbers are already assigned.
Assigning The Start List
On the start list page, select the All Racers Start in One Group option.
Racer numbers were already assigned in the CSV file that was used to create the race, so do not do anything in the Assign Racer Numbers step. Setting a scheduled start time is probably unnecessary, we will record an actual start time for all racers.
Creating Option Fields
When racers are uploaded from CSV, we don’t automatically know which fields racers can be grouped on, and which fields contain data like names that can’t be used to create racer groups. In order to group racers into courses and categories on results, fields need to be marked as Option Fields.
From the race overview, navigate to Racer Reports and Tools:
Then select Manage Data Fields… which takes you to a list of all the fields in your race, which should match the list of columns in the CSV file you started with. For the “race type” field and any other fields that you might want to group racers on like category, select the three-dot menu beside the field name and change it from “text” to “option”:
Creating Course Groups
In a time-limit format race, the course groups are used to specify an end time for the group of racers. On the Device Setup page, select the Split Racers into Course Groups option, and then select the “race type” field in the Add Racer Group Field menu:
And then after clicking continue, you will be prompted to set an end time for each course group:
Selecting Timing Devices
Because we are timing this race on the serverbox, this step must be done on the serverbox. Timing Devices do not synchronize between the webserver and the serverbox.
At the start of the race, we’ll want to put a phone or summit on the start, and we’ll use that to record the actual start time, and both the chip timer at the precall and the chip timer at the finish line will be used as “on course” devices to track which team member is actually starting the race.
After all the racers have started, we’ll change those devices around so that the chip timer at the finish is a Timing Device, the chip timer at precall is a Precall Device, and we’ll remove the summit from the start and add it to the lap as well to act as our On-Course Device for the remainder of the race.
On-Course Racers
To control errant chip reads from the other team members hanging around the finish area with their bikes, we’re going to use an on-course device to track whether a racer is currently racing or not. Unless a racer is marked as being on-course, all times recorded with their timing chip will be ignored. Additionally, when a team-member is marked as on-course, times recorded on the on-course device will be ignored. A team member cannot be marked as on-course by a timing device if another team member is already on-course. Racers are marked as off-course when they complete their lap. The on-course logic also applies to solo racers – after they finish a lap, no more times will be recorded until they are marked as on-course again.
Immediately after the start, while the chip timers are still in on-course mode, racers will be marked as on-course by having their chip time recorded. After that, they will be marked as on-course by typing in the number of the racer on the summit or tablet used as the on-course device.
Additionally, you can change the on-course status at any time by clicking Set on the racer, if the racer is a team:
or Mark as On Course in the more options menu for a solo racer.
To view the list of racers that are currently on course, find the lap/finish timing point under the timing tab:
Where you’ll see the On Course and Not On Course tabs:
Recording & Entering Times
Hopefully, the chips pick up times for everybody and we don’t have to correct anything during the race, but that’s probably unrealistic. For solo racers, this is easy – you can just click on the racer and enter the correct time in the appropriate spot. For team racers, we need to control which team member each time is associated with.
Immediately beside each time, you’ll see the racer number that the time was recorded on. You can click that number to change which team member the time is associated with. All times are shown as 24-hour time-of-day in this screen.
In the three-dot menu beside the racer number, there’s the useful-sounding options “shift times up” and “shift time down”. Do not use those tools on teams, they only work on solo racers right now.
Results
We’ll probably want a few different types of results, for overall / category / subcategory / etc, and we can decide that at the race. One thing that we’ll do a bit different this race is to enable Racer Pages
On the public results, we’ll only display the total time and the lap count to avoid the results getting way too wide, and people will be able to click a racer or team’s name to view a full list of all the laps completed, which looks like this:
Announcer
On the announcer screen, racers who have been read by the precall and have not crossed the timing point yet will display a lap count only (no time) on the right column. When they cross the line, their time will populate.
For racers on a team, the team member‘s name will show up, and the team name will show up on the second line.
The full help page for the announcer system is here.
