Class Order

In today's edition of how I would run the race track I would like to talk about the running order of the divisions at my weekly track. My theory of how I would set my class order each night came after reading Steve Eighinger's (better known as "Stevie Dirt") summaries of Sunday night shows in the past at the Quincy Raceways.

Steve would list the number of cautions that occurred in each class on a given night and over several weeks it became obvious that one division always had more than the rest. Even with these stats though, for some reason that class always seemed to be either first or second on the schedule each night. Having been at some of those race nights it was obvious that the offending class would stir up the crowd with many of them pleading with officials to take them off the track after fifteen or twenty minutes had passed with still several laps remaining. It was not fair to the crowd, or the drivers in that class who were not causing the cautions so this is the method that I came up with "If I Ran The Race Track" for setting the running order.

With a dirt track you sometimes have to set your heat race order in a manner that will give you the best surface later in the night. Some nights you want the skinny tires out first and the wide tires later while on another night you might need those wide tires to run their heats first and have the skinny tire classes up later. So the heat race order would not be set until that evening, however it may or may not match the running order of the feature races as they would be set as follows.

Just like Stevie Dirt did, you would keep track of the number of cautions that were needed for each class on a given race night, both heats and features, and the class with the lowest average number of cautions would run their feature first while the class with the highest average number of cautions would run their feature last.

And, to make sure to keep the show moving along at a nice pace, each feature race would have a time limit equal to the number of laps that are to be run, but with a twist. I have never been a fan of throwing a checkered flag on a race that had reached its time limit prior to running all of the scheduled laps. It is a disappointment for the drivers, and their friends and family who came out to primarily watch them, to have a race cut short by the time limit so here is how I would handle that.

A designated area, let's call it a "Reset Area", would be set up in my pit area and when the time limit is reached all of the cars that are still in the race would be sent to that area to be parked and no work would be allowed to be done on the cars. The drivers can get out and go relax, or watch the other features and then at the end of the feature order they would return to the track to complete their remaining laps.

Time spent during a red flag would not count toward the time limit on a feature and the final feature of the night would not be under a time limit unless one of the earlier features had cars already sitting in the "Reset Area".

Under this method no assumptions are made, it is all based upon statistics so if you have a class that causes the most trouble, their feature race is the last one of the night and fans can make the decision if they want to hang in there and ride it out, or head for the gates. And all features are able to race their fully scheduled number of laps. If a class feels that they are getting a "raw deal" by having to run at the end of the night all the time, all they have to do is get together and work toward running cleaner races and soon they will be moving up in the race order.

So there you have it, now that I have made up my mind that I will never promote another race, feel free to use it as, or make some adjustments to better fit your track. Your fans will appreciate it! At least this one will.