In the NW we are using a transponder system that counts laps as the cars drive over a grid we tape to the track. In years past when we used to manually count laps it was very commonplace for there to be numerous errors at every race. Our new system had a few bugs when we first got it that caused some headaches, but has worked excelent since they were ironed out (the issue turned out to be a USB to serial adaptor that was not properly transfering data). Ironicly, even at races that we did both hand counts and data logging, when the data logger acted up it turned out to be more accurate than the hand counts when we audited the races. We usually have a lot of cars at our races and it is commonplace to have 6-8 cars pass the line in a pack in less than 10 seconds.
So, I am just curious how other areas are counting their laps.
Well our main races in NECA are at Berlin Motor Speedway and they have there own official transponder system that was built in the track. It can get lap times to the closest thousandth. Everywhere else we manually count laps and the system we have is we have one of our team members count our laps and a random competing team member count our laps as well so it usually comes out right.
powerdrive in Nebraska uses 1 volunteer per car with an overseer watching everyone. Seems to work ok. I don't think we run more than 15/20 cars per heat.
On car transponder system sounds like the best solution to me. That's what I'm used to with electric RC car racing anyway. Does it cost a lot of money to purchase one of these systems? What brand / model are you using and where can you get it?
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On car transponder system sounds like the best solution to me. That's what I'm used to with electric RC car racing anyway. Does it cost a lot of money to purchase one of these systems? What brand / model are you using and where can you get it?
We have a system that was graciously designed and built for us by a company that does transponders. It is not comercially available. There have been a couple computer issues with the system, but compared to the errors we used to have from manual counting it has been a Godsend. I remember one race last year that was both manually counted and computer counted as we were learning the system. We knew there was a few errors and did an audit (via watching the video) to find the errors. The amazing part was that even with our errors we were very close. The manual counted results were way off. Over the years I have been involved with a number of audits of the race results and it is amazing how many times there were errors (usually not by us, but by the racers team doing back-up counting). I can say I do not remember anyone coming up and complaining we gave them too many laps, but that does happen fairly often from hand counting.
