raceManager videos and practice system - by: Mark Elkington

Hi
I have been asked by a couple of people recently "where has the raceManager practice system gone?". I thought it might be useful to post the information here - in case anyone with an OOD duty coming up is also unsure.

From the home page menu - navigate as follows ...  

• Sailing -> Dinghy Racing -> Race Officer Info -> raceManager RACEBOX

ALTERNATIVELY – just use the link   www.starcrossyc.org.uk/rm-racebox-information

FINAL OPTION – use the search function to look for all ‘raceManager’ related pages

You may  WILL find it helpful to watch the two raceManager videos on the racebox information page before trying out the demo system.

You do need to be logged in to use the practice system.

The practice system allows you to select whether to run a Sunday Series, Evening Series, or Trophy race (it doesn't support the pursuit race format yet - if you are allocated a pursuit race get in touch with me and I'll give you an online demonstration)

To run the practice race - pick the race you want to run then:

• Set the laps for each fleet on the STATUS page
• Go to the ENTRY page and click the red button indicating entries that are waiting to be loaded
• Go to the START PAGE and click the green button to start the timer – watch the start sequence process (note for the practice system I have changed the time between starts to 2 minutes to get through the start sequence quicker). While you are here look at the help for this page (top menu) and check out the general recall procedure and what to do if you forgot to start the timer when you started the lights box
• Go to the TIMER page – it will start up in the “tabbed” mode – you can get to the other VIEW modes using the CHANGE VIEW option in the top menu. Most OODs seem to like the CLASS view option where all fleets are shown on the page with boats organized into groups by class. Best just to play around with the tabbed and class view until you see how it works. I strongly encourage you to experiment with the bunch "feature" - saves an awful lot of panic when you have a group of boats crossing the line at the same time.
• On the results page the SAVE RESULTS option doesn’t do anything (as we don't want 'practice' results to be retained). On you OOD duty day this is the most important button - clicking this will produce all the results files BUT also archive copies of the results so that we can always recover them.

If you have any questions after running the practice system - please post them here or via my contact form and I'll do my best to answer them.

regards

Mark