Reflections after running my first ever PWD race
Posted: Mon Jan 28, 2013 2:31 pm
I have to admit, agreeing to be PWD chairman 1 year in advance, gave me the time to properly prepare for this by reading all I could on this site and many hours of prep and planning. It really paid off. I can't imagine how those folks that get thrown the coordination job with just 2 weeks to race day handle it. Lesson there is when it comes time to find my successor, give them a full year as well. It really helps.
We had a great race on Saturday. It went without a hitch (almost).
The biggest thing I changed this year was we upgraded to Grand Prix Race Manager software. Nobody is asking me or paying me to say this, but it made all the difference in the world in terms of running a good race. We used something called "Race Tender" last year and it was buggy and didn't have anywhere near the features that GPRM has. The best $60 our pack ever spent on PWD materials.
I also got Race Replay setup and working. The kids and the crowd really loved seeing an instant replay of every race. It gave everyone something to look at while the next set of cars were being staged. That is a keeper. There are some things I want to improve in this area, mainly due to the fact that I'm running it on a laptop that doesn't meet the CPU specs the software requires.
For inspection night (we do inspections the night before the race), we speeded things up by having two new "go/no go" boxes that seem to be made by Randy L., but we bought them from Maximum Velocity. That really made the inspection process quick and easy. We also had 2 scales with 0.1 precision displayed and that worked well too. We checked in 72 cars in about 40 minutes and that included taking pictures of all the racers!
I used the "inspection data sheets" printed out from GPRM to ensure each of the inspection crew knew what to look for and consistently checked the same things on each car. This also gave me a written record of each check in, which was handy.
A HUGE improvement was that I printed out all the heat schedules from GPRM Friday night and handed them to the pit crew Saturday. They were able to stage the cars such that we were running heats very quickly and not much "down" time. Very efficient. Since we have our kids return the cars them selves to the stagers, we were only ever "waiting" when a car was in back to back heats, which sometimes happened, but even then, not too bad.
My only glitch was operator error when it came time to advance Scouts to the Grand Finals. Our algorithm is to advance the top 2 from each Den and the top 5 fastest overall. I ended up advancing the top 2 from each Rank, but because there were 2 ranks with 2 Dens, I ended up leaving the Scouts with the slower times in that rank out of the Grand Finals. That was my mistake. Luckily, it was pointed out before we announced winners and I quickly came up with a schedule to run the 4 "missing" kids cars and get their times and compare them to the others who had already run their grand finals heats. Turns out they were not in top 3 as expected, so all got fair treatment and got to see their cars run as part of Grand Finals. Now I know for next year!
All in all, a very good experience and the leaders have all told me it was the best PWD the pack has ever had, although they are not all that thrilled with how my family's cars managed to win all the top trophies. Hey, you can't spend a year reading DT and not learn something about how to build fast cars!
Thanks for all the great advice from the experts on this board, your time spent helping others really pays off in many ways.
thanks,
birddog
We had a great race on Saturday. It went without a hitch (almost).
The biggest thing I changed this year was we upgraded to Grand Prix Race Manager software. Nobody is asking me or paying me to say this, but it made all the difference in the world in terms of running a good race. We used something called "Race Tender" last year and it was buggy and didn't have anywhere near the features that GPRM has. The best $60 our pack ever spent on PWD materials.
I also got Race Replay setup and working. The kids and the crowd really loved seeing an instant replay of every race. It gave everyone something to look at while the next set of cars were being staged. That is a keeper. There are some things I want to improve in this area, mainly due to the fact that I'm running it on a laptop that doesn't meet the CPU specs the software requires.
For inspection night (we do inspections the night before the race), we speeded things up by having two new "go/no go" boxes that seem to be made by Randy L., but we bought them from Maximum Velocity. That really made the inspection process quick and easy. We also had 2 scales with 0.1 precision displayed and that worked well too. We checked in 72 cars in about 40 minutes and that included taking pictures of all the racers!
I used the "inspection data sheets" printed out from GPRM to ensure each of the inspection crew knew what to look for and consistently checked the same things on each car. This also gave me a written record of each check in, which was handy.
A HUGE improvement was that I printed out all the heat schedules from GPRM Friday night and handed them to the pit crew Saturday. They were able to stage the cars such that we were running heats very quickly and not much "down" time. Very efficient. Since we have our kids return the cars them selves to the stagers, we were only ever "waiting" when a car was in back to back heats, which sometimes happened, but even then, not too bad.
My only glitch was operator error when it came time to advance Scouts to the Grand Finals. Our algorithm is to advance the top 2 from each Den and the top 5 fastest overall. I ended up advancing the top 2 from each Rank, but because there were 2 ranks with 2 Dens, I ended up leaving the Scouts with the slower times in that rank out of the Grand Finals. That was my mistake. Luckily, it was pointed out before we announced winners and I quickly came up with a schedule to run the 4 "missing" kids cars and get their times and compare them to the others who had already run their grand finals heats. Turns out they were not in top 3 as expected, so all got fair treatment and got to see their cars run as part of Grand Finals. Now I know for next year!
All in all, a very good experience and the leaders have all told me it was the best PWD the pack has ever had, although they are not all that thrilled with how my family's cars managed to win all the top trophies. Hey, you can't spend a year reading DT and not learn something about how to build fast cars!
Thanks for all the great advice from the experts on this board, your time spent helping others really pays off in many ways.
thanks,
birddog