The Handicapper’s Tale - By Allan L

[Otto Puzzell]

The Handicapper's Tale

It has been mentioned elsewhere that, as one of my motoring-related pastimes, I have been a licensed Handicapper for rather a long time: I thought some might like to read about it, so here is a rough outline of motor race handicapping and my involvement with it.

One of the many features of horse racing that were transferred to motor racing when Brooklands was inaugurated a century ago was handicapping. As with the horses, the idea was that to allow everyone a chance of winning, you had to accept that variations in potential performance had to be levelled out (and indeed the German term for the man who does it is "Ausgleicher" (= equaliser)). As with the nags the early handicapping was done by adding ballast, and variations of that were still used in the TT in the late 1920s (and in Touring Car racing in the 1990s where rear-drive cars were ballasted to allow the front-drivers a chance).

Read the rest here...

[Ultra]

Really good read, Allan L.   Thanks for contributing this article.

[Allan L]

Glad you like it - makes a change from the normal stuff on your site, if nothing else!
Do you have any handicapped motor races in the States?

[Ultra]

Glad you like it - makes a change from the normal stuff on your site,

OUR site!!!!!!

Don't know if there are any handicapped races or not.

[@re]

OUR site!!!!!!

Was wondering how long it'd take before you said that

[Otto Puzzell]

Back on the Front Page!

http://www.autopuzzles.com

[Allan L]

Thanks for that!

[Otto Puzzell]

Thank you for contributing a very good feature. 

[Otto Puzzell]

Back on the Front Page!

http://www.autopuzzles.com

[Allan L]

Thanks for that, and particularly for using the Sammy Davis cartoon!

[socram]

Interesting article.  I have been running a road/race series here in NZ for 16 years for European cars.  It is unique in NZ in that only the handicaps count for points.   The format for each race meeting is one practice, 1 scratch race (no points) and two handicap races.

I develeloped a straightforward spreadsheet programme that records all fastest laps in each practice and each race and without getting too deep, it takes into account the first lap (being slow of course) and that difference varies from track to track, so there are spreadsheets for each track.

As weather conditions can make a huge difference to lap times, there is a column that has a weighting between past history and the current weekend. That means that if wet, it might be 4 of today's best, added to the best historical lap, divided by 5.  When it is dry and 'normal', then the weighting is changed to 2:3 or 3:2.

We generally get the whole field of 25 to 30 cars through in less than 30 seconds, BUT, if the result is poor, it can be from several factors, not limited to a yellow flag, unintentional blocking or in rare cases, a row not going off the line when it should.

We "interfere" with the system so as to penalise any driver who maybe had an unfair advantage previously or may even have already won a race or two, as the aim is as you say, to get every car across the line at the same time and for the series to retain interest and annually, to get a different winner each season.   It must work as we have two grids at each meeting!
   

[Allan L]

Well that's interesting of course.

As I think I wrote in the article, we used race average lap times, rather than fastest laps, because we always had inconsistant customers who could put in one uncharacteristic fast lap now and then. Comparing our results with the VSCC (which used "best lap") a consistant competitor whose every lap was within 0.1s of his best ran away with their races and finished 15th out of 30 in ours. Everyone should finish 15th if the sums are right!

You don't say how many laps you race for, but our target spread of finishers is 2 seconds times the number of laps. That's because we keep records and work to one second per lap so the accuracy is +/- one second per lap.
Mind you as you will agree it isn't always that simple. I did a 10-lap race once where the spread from first to last was 25 seconds, but the winner had caught me out so ran away with it to win by some 12 seconds and the last man had had a spin so trailed by 5-6 seconds. There were seven very busy seconds for the timekeepers, though fortunately it was a small field.

I tried to use a spreadsheet in later times, as my program wouldn't operate under Windows. I found it very hard to build in an overtaking allowance algorithm and the credit lap calculations were not much easier to arrange.