by RichD » Fri Jun 07, 2019 5:37 am
Trackmate is supposed to save the race results as a text file, it would be nice if it saved the race as an Excel file like Race Coordinator does. It is too bad that I did not shoot a picture of the screen at the end of each race. There were a lot of ties and Trackmate does not always break ties correctly, so were were mostly concerned with those. When the cars were done they were parked in an unused inside lane. In the case of a tie a fraction of a lap was added to break the tie, often Trackmate had it wrong, for example in the COY race cars 2, 84 and 62 all had 129 laps. The actual finishing order was 84, 2 and 62. 2 and 62 were VERY close in fact. When you race on a small oval your lap times will not be consistent. If you catch a slower car that is on your inside and that car is sliding all over the place you will have trouble making a pass and you could easily lose a lap or two. If you did try a pass and got bumped off you would be likely to lose at least half a lap. Another issue is that each driver would only have a particular car for a single heat. When the power comes on you never know how the car will drive. We usually tell the next driver that gets the car how much brake it will need, in any case it will usually take a few laps to get up to speed and a controller adjustment might be needed. It is difficult to make on the fly controller adjustments when you are racing on a small oval.
The fact is that many cars will not have race laps that are as good as their qualifying laps. For the next race I will try to get screen shots of the results.