District or Council Derby

A district or council derby is not a pack's own race with more cars — it is several packs' qualifiers, raced together, on one track, one rank at a time. This guide walks through setting one up: the wizard answer, a roster that arrives from a dozen packs, check-in, the schedule, race day, and the awards a district event hands out.

If you have not read Getting Started yet, do that first — this guide only covers what is different about a district event, and everything else (System Settings, the roster toolbar, running a heat) works exactly as it does there.

What a district derby looks like

A dozen packs send their qualifiers — the top few from each rank, typically — to one hall with one track. Ranks race one after another: Lions first, then Tigers, and so on through Arrow of Light, each as its own block on the schedule. A rank's own standings decide that rank's champion. Once every rank has raced, the top few from each rank come back for a grand final — one field, everybody racing together, one overall winner.

Nothing about that shape is new to Trusty Track. A rank is an ordinary racing group; racing "by rank" is the same qualifying format a pack already uses when it races "by den"; and a grand final drawing from every rank at once is an ordinary championship round. What this guide covers is the guided path through the parts that are new to a district event specifically: the wizard's own district answer, a roster carrying each racer's home pack, and the round wizard's own by-rank default.

Setting it up: the wizard's district answer

From the Home page, click + Create New Race the same way you would for a pack's own derby. On the Kind of event step, choose Cub Scouts, then — a question offered only for Cub Scouts — How big is it? and pick A district or council derby.

That one answer does three things differently from a pack's own derby:

• The event's own words become District and Rank rather than Pack and Den — a racer's home pack keeps its own word regardless; see below.
• The Dens step still scaffolds the same six Cub Scout ranks, in their rank colors, now labelled Ranks under a District. Remove the ones nobody is sending tonight the same way you would remove a den from a pack's own list — a district rarely fields all six.
• The Round Wizard, once you reach the Schedule tab, opens with different defaults — covered in its own section below, since you get there after the roster, not as part of this wizard.

Finish the Details step as you would for any race — name, date, location, track, scoring — and click Create Race.

The roster: a racer's own home pack

A district roster arrives from a dozen packs, each with its own numbering, and the announcer and the results wall want "Johnny, Pack 12, Bear" — not just "Johnny". Trusty Track carries this as each racer's own Home Pack, separate from the rank they race within (which, at a district event, is shared across every pack that sent a racer to it).

The easiest way in is a CSV import with a Pack column, the same Import from CSV dialog every roster uses (Roster → ⋯ → Import from CSV) — a Pack, Home Pack, Home Unit, or Unit header is picked up automatically. Add racers by hand instead, and each one gets a Home Pack field on the roster form. Either way, the roster's own table grows a Home Pack column the moment any racer on it has one set — invisible on an ordinary pack derby, where nobody sets one.

Check-in works exactly as it does for a pack's own derby — see Race Setup if this is your first race.

The schedule: by rank, then a grand final

Once your roster is checked in, open the Schedule tab and click Start Round Creation Wizard, the same as any race. For a district or council derby, it no longer opens on "everyone races together" — it already knows what you are setting up:

• Step 1 opens on By Rank rather than "All District" — one qualifying round per rank, the same Format choice a pack's own "by den" race uses.
• Step 2's championship round opens on Each Rank, with Number to pick defaulting to 2 per rank (never fewer than your race's own Championship Trophies setting) — the grand final's own field. A second checkbox, Also give one overall trophy, is already ticked: besides a champion for each rank, it seeds a trophy for whoever is fastest across the whole grand final — the event's overall winner.

Everything else about the wizard is unchanged: adjust the pick count, runs per lane, or add further championship rounds the same way you would for any race. Click Generate schedule.

A note on the wizard scaffolding six ranks. If a rank nobody sent racers to is still in the list from the setup wizard's own scaffold, the round wizard simply skips it — a rank with nobody checked in never becomes a round, the same rule a pack's own "by den" race already follows. Removing an unused rank on the setup wizard's own Dens step keeps the roster and the Awards page free of trophies nobody will ever win, but it is not required.

A track that idles between ranks is exactly what master running order exists for — interleaving one rank's heats with the next's, so the track never sits empty while the next rank's cars are staged. It is off by default; turn it on from the race's own Event settings.

Race day

Running the heats is identical to any other race — see Race Day. Racers are called by name, car number and rank as usual; wherever a screen has room for it (the operator's own heat view, a printed heat sheet), a racer's home pack rides along beside their name.

Awards: per-rank champions and a grand-final trophy

The moment the round wizard builds the grand final, the Awards page already has both sets waiting, with nobody decided until the racing says so:

• One 1st Place/2nd Place/… set per rank — "Fastest in Lion", "Fastest in Tiger", and so on — narrowed to that rank's own racers within the grand final.
• One further set, unscoped to any rank, for whoever is fastest across the whole grand final — the event's overall winner. This is the Also give one overall trophy checkbox from the round wizard; untick it there if your district only wants the per-rank trophies.

A racer's own name on this page carries their home pack too — "Johnny (#12) · Pack 12" — the same awardText rule every other award already uses, reading home_unit when a racer has one.

At most one trophy per racer applies here exactly as it does for a pack's own den trophies: if the grand-final winner is also their own rank's fastest, turning on One trophy per racer on the race's own settings rolls their rank trophy down to the next-fastest racer in that rank, with a note on the Awards page saying why.

Multi-session events

Nothing enforces the race date on a round, a heat, or the schedule as a whole — a council that runs qualifiers one weekend and the grand final the next needs no special setup. Race the qualifying rounds, leave the grand final's heats unrun, and come back to them later; the schedule and the standings are exactly as you left them. The one thing to plan around by hand is the roster: check-in admits a racer the moment they arrive, so a pack arriving for the finals-only session still needs to be on the roster and checked in before its cars can be slotted into the final.

What is not supported yet

• A per-rank cut size. Number to pick on the grand final's own round is one number, applied to every rank equally — a council that wants 3 Bears and 2 Lions in the grand final has no single-question way to ask for that yet. Add further championship rounds by hand, or adjust a rank's own field with I'll choose who races myself on the round wizard, in the meantime.
• A knockout stage between the ranks and the grand final. Some councils run an optional bracket to trim the field before the grand final; today's championship-round vocabulary can only chain to one combined source, not several ranks' own knockout brackets at once. Two workarounds get most of the way there: chain a single elimination round after qualifying (the whole event races it together, not by rank), or build the grand final as an ordinary each-rank round and run a second, hand-configured elimination round afterward for its own field.
• Simultaneous tracks. A district that runs several tracks at once and merges the results is a different, larger feature — see the architecture issue if that is what your event needs; the pattern this guide covers is the one districts actually run in practice, one track with ranks as blocks.