I'm gonna call semi-BS on this, or at least use it as an opportunity to educate.rojeho wrote:One car at a time turned a short course into a long course since there was no overlap. I'm ok with it because I liked the different flow of this course.
Our typical "goal" is to release a car every 25-30 seconds. Quicker than 25 seconds and both timing and course workers have trouble keeping up. Just under 30 seconds is about perfect for a nicely-paced, but "casual" event.
Example: A healthy 50-to-60 second course at Brooksville has us releasing a second car usually just after car makes the turn-around, a little after the half-way point. That gives us a roughly 28-32 second start interval. We're used to it. It works. We usually get 6-8 runs with that. (Depending on the number of entries, which has climbed from 50-60 to a pretty consistent 60-70, which makes a difference! The fact that we no longer have less than 60 drivers probably means that the days of 8 runs are behind us. But, we have more competition, which is fun.)
I'm not sure what the "average" run time was today (just got the results, but haven't looked at them yet), but I know that the fast guys were turning times in the high 20's... (27-30ish) so everyone else was probably in the 30-35 second range. Call it an average of about 33 seconds, or 3 seconds more than our target.
3 seconds per run for 6 runs and 65 drivers adds up to: 3x6x65 / 60 seconds in a minute = 19.5 minutes. Divide that over 3 run groups and it added a total of about 7 minutes per run group... divide by 6 runs... about a minute for each run "batch".
In other words, the timing of this course didn't amount to much because it was only a 30-second course.
Don't get me wrong, start interval is THE key to maximizing seat time and the number of runs for all drivers. But, if the course is less than 35-seconds long... it's not a big deal if there is no overlap. It's when you have a longer course that you need to really think about how to get that start interval down to around 30-seconds.
Let's look at 20 minutes per run batch... I think the first run group was heavy on cars, so probably about 25 cars. Using our 33-second average, if everything went perfectly, we'd be looking at right about 14 minutes per run. The 20-minutes you guys clocked was merely the addition of 6-minutes of checking out and resetting the timer after <ahem> somebody hit it. Without that... 14 minutes, call it 15... x6 runs = 1.5 hours.
Another truth is (and I wasn't really watching the clock, so I have no numbers) that for whatever reason, we were pretty consistently slow about getting each heat started today. It seemed like the course workers were usually out there and ready, the cars were in grid... but for whatever reason (probably a bunch of different ones, stuff happens), we blew an extra 5-10 minutes at the beginning of each heat.
I'll stop babbling now.
Can't remember when I had this much fun over two days!
Fun to see newer people to this sport having so much fun, and some of them them stuck around to the end to help with clean up and helped reset the course. Can't thank you guys enough for that. 8)