Year two with GPRM

[mokanmikey]

Just a quick post to graceman , John S.and the other good folk on the board that share such good information.

We just compleated our second year of using our Judge and GPRM Software and everything ran flawlessly.
I have had a lot of anxiety each year before the Derby placing my hands in technology, praying "Murphy" wouldn't show up and crash everthing I have been working so hard on.

Last year we had only one small problem with the new way of doing things.
A parent checked in a car Friday night, then decided to take it home and work on it some more, so I unchecked it from the Passed list and he put it back on Stage Sat morning without telling me, so his son was left out. We later let him pick two friends to run aginst, raced his car, and manually put him in the order where he shoud be. To make sure this doesn't happen again, we set the schedule then count the cars just to make sure... I suggest you do the same.

This year we discovered the rerun heat button to be a great asset as some cars were placed on the wrong lane durring a heat.

This was all Human error that the program and timer made potentialy bad situations turn out ok!

Getting to know the software is key to running a succsessful derby and thanks again to everone !!

[gpraceman]

I'm glad that your race went well and the software was a help.

On the cars in the wrong lane issue. We have two people at the start gate. One operates the gate and the other verifies that the cars are in the correct lane (looks up at the projection screen). Having TPI (two person integrity) really helps and we rarely get cars in the wrong lanes.

[dna1990]

We too use the last-chance two-human check.

The gate man just picks up the cars as they were handed to him by the impound crew (they work from a paper list). The gate man concentrates first on correct placement and alignment. He then reads the numbers to a person looking at the live computer screen (if for some reason the paper list gets off) and the computer operator throws a thumbs up if it matches and he sees his software as green to race. The gate man throws the lever.

While cars are being placed on the track, the computer operator is looking down track to be sure the finish line is clear and the track itself has no issue.

We averaged 45 seconds per heat for 140 runs. We did catch a couple of mis-matches with this check. Usually due to reverse numbers, like 68 instead of 86, etc. But no re-runs needed.

[No we don't have Scouts stage their own cars...maybe someday. Scouts retrieve their cars from the finish and return them to the impound.]




Maybe in the Pro-Pro version of GPRM there will be a serial output of the current race's car numbers. These are fed to LED digits placed at the rear of the starting gate....


We started numbering at 10 an went into the 100's. My suggestion for next year is to make each rank start with a hundreds group. 100 for Weeblos, 200 for Bears, etc. We race only ranks at a time. And rather that fumble thru three digit read-offs, the gate and computer operators could use only the last two digits. Also if a cars gets lost in the wrong pile, it would be easier to spot.

[Darin McGrew]

My suggestion for next year is to make each rank start with a hundreds group. 100 for Weeblos, 200 for Bears, etc. We race only ranks at a time. And rather that fumble thru three digit read-offs, the gate and computer operators could use only the last two digits.

That method works well. We've been using it for quite a while.

[doct1010]

That method works well. We've been using it for quite a while.

Ditto