Timing
Pre-race setup
Zone4 allows you to do quite a lot while the race is in progress, but it’s still best to be prepared and get some things setup beforehand. Let’s walk through some of the steps you might take and some settings to tweak.
1. Race Settings
Here you set some basic race information, and setup the format of your race. Pay attention to the start and end time - a common mistake is to set the actual race start time, but really you need to set it several hours earlier to allow for testing before the race. Leave plenty of time after the race as well in case things end up running longer.
The serverbox toggle will be turned on if you’re timing with a serverbox obviously.
Authorized users allows you to give others access to this race that might not be part of your club timing team normally. They’ll need to have a Zone4 account already.
Everything else here is pretty well documented, and for most races you won’t need to touch too many of these settings.
2. Racers
Your racers will usually just be imported from the race registration. Nothing much else to do here typically, but you can use this screen to look up individual racers later.
3. Start List
Here someone will setup the Start Groups, bib numbering for each group, start times, and seeding information. This is typically done by the Race Secretary and is out of the scope of my knowledge. If you’d like to contribute more to this section please do!
The bibs, chips, and start times should all be assigned.
4. Courses
Course groups should be created for each separate course in your race. Typically this would be different distances used by different age groups, but you may also have different courses for Paranordic sit-ski for instance.
Each course group should have a number of laps set - this is important to make sure times are assigned correctly.
Zone4 will warn you if you have racers in your race that don’t fall into any course groups.
TODO info on actually configuring the groups
Timing Devices
Here you will select the timing devices to be used at each timing point in the race, and also create any intermediate timing points. You might assign a Summit to the start, a GoChip device to the laps, and then a Summit and GoChip device at the finish for instance.
A minimum split time between laps can be added to ensure recorded times make sense. This may help cut down on any mistakes if skiers go the wrong way before turning back.
5. Results
Here you’ll define the different result sets you want to create. You’ll come here during the race to view the current results, and also to post results live to Zone4 or change their status to Official. You can create several different results sets for different purposes, maybe one for overall results, and one broken down by sub-category.
For awards it’s often helpful to have a result set that only includes the top 6 finishers in each category, and that can easily be created here but not published online.
There’s also an announcer view that can be enabled. This is a great feature that provides announcers with a constantly updating view of racer information as they cross a given timing point. If you have the budget, you can even add a timing point at the start of the finish chute just for use by the announcer view to give them a view of racers as they arrive at the stadium.
Note - this announcer view is not limited to the default provided one, but can actually be enabled from any result set. Just open the result set then click Publish and Print -> Commentator View.
Sadly I couldn’t get a screenshot of this view.
TODO info on actually configuring result sets TODO example on useful result sets: overall, category, chip handout lists, etc
During the race
The main screen you’ll need during the race itself are the timing grids for each timing point, and the results screen. I would suggest opening each of these in a separate tab in your browser and then switching back and forth during the race.
TODO
- Timing grids
- Results
- Marking DNS and DNF
- Sample bib order sheet, old Zone4 interface uploaded as assets