• Open racing, no tracking. The kids like to see their cars race. Let them line up, potentially with friends. When they get to the head of the line, run the cars down. The electronics can still let them know how fast their car went. Then they can recover their car and go stand in line again.
• Open racing, tracking. This is quite similar to the above, except before the cars are loaded onto the track their car numbers are entered into the computer for the appropriate lanes. Then at the end of the evening (or on 1/2 hour intervals) reports can be printed which gives rankings for each car, and can also report them by dens. Both of the open racing ideas have the property that kids can come early or late, and leave early or late, and still enjoy their time at the track. There is hopefully less bookkeeping, so races can run faster.
• Short formal race, combined with one of the open racing ideas. Our track currently has no fast or slow lanes. The recorded times show that quite well. So instead of running all cars in all lanes, only run them in two lanes. Don't worry about the runoff races. Depending if tracking is done in the open race time or not, you can have a fastest 8 cars in pack race at some point.
• Leave it alone. It may be that the kids see no advantages to the changes. That can work as well.

Last modified 27 May 2006
Questions or comments can be sent to Dave Regan.