Pack Results, new outlook on timing!

[Barga Racing]

Yesterday was our pack race. We only have 44 registered scouts and of those only 33 showed up. My son was 1st in Webelos 1 and second in pack for the 2nd year in a row to the same kid. We built 2 cars this year and during testing Sat I broke the front end off the coolest looking one. Fortunately it was also the slowest so my son was not too upset although he was not happy. Back to the topic. I have read several discussions regarding scoring methods. I have read with interest the arguments against using overall time but never really thought much of it because we have always used that and considered it fair. Just to let you know I still think it to be pretty fair but my son got burned on one of those rare instances. We have a new 4 lane track and are using a supertimer system with a race manager software on a computor. They ran 2 times on each lane. After the first round of den racing the computor regroups all cars with similar speeds so my son and the other boy raced head to head the next 7 races. It was really good because the other boy was very consistent and my sons car seemed to be all over the place so you never knew who was going to win. When it was all said and done it was 4-3 in favor of my son head to head and the race they did not race against each other the other boy would have won based on time. Now the sticky part. My son had 2 runs that were faster than the other boys best, 3.1074 and 3.1061 compared to 3.1123. But because my son had a bad run of 3.1408 in between the 2 3.10 runs he lost the overall average by .0002. I told myself that the other kid deserved it because he was very consistent but for the heck of it I figured the averages with throwing out the worst time for each. It would then have been 3.1183 - 3.197 in favor of my son. I then figured it with throwing out the best and worst for each and it came to 3.1204 - 3.1209 in favor of my son. I am no statistition but if you throw out the outliers I think that is a better indication of consistency. Anyways, not complaining just pointing out that I have a new appreciation for arguements against using times. Now we have some work to do before districts.

[terryep]

Good points all, consider that the cub could have an impact on his times by better staging of his car. More care could decide the winner.

Terry

[Stan Pope]

Thank you for doing the analysis, WW! Very interesting to have a "real life" example.

Choosing a scoring method boils down to deciding what factors of "fast" are important and deciding how they will be combined in order to make one single measure of "fast." Not as easy as it sounds, is it?

In any case, it sounds like your pack had two really great cars! Better yet, you son brought one of them!