Race and track settings

Every field on the race form and the track card, and what each one does.

The race

Set when you create a race (+ Create New Race on Home) and editable afterwards from the Roster page's Edit Details button — or, without going there first, from Edit race in a race row's ⋯ menu on Home, or from the Edit race button on Race Control. All three open the same form.

The edit form is in four sections, listed down its left: Event, Scoring, Check-in and Words and names. Pick the one holding the setting you came for; Save Changes saves every section at once, whichever is up. If something in a section that is not on screen would stop the save — a blank name, say — the form switches to that section and says what is wrong, rather than refusing over a field you cannot see. The + Create New Race form is the same fields on one page under the same headings, since the first time through you are filling everything in anyway — it is the last step of the setup wizard, described next.

Creating a race: the setup wizard

+ Create New Race opens a short wizard rather than the bare form, so a race arrives with its dens already made and its words already chosen. Next and Back move between the steps; nothing is saved until Create Race on the last one.

Step	What it asks
Start	Only once a race already exists: Start from scratch, or Copy settings from a previous race (below).
Kind of event	What is being raced — Pinewood Derby (cars), Space Derby (rockets) or Raingutter Regatta (boats). Who is holding it — Cub Scouts, Awana, A school, or Something else. For Cub Scouts, whether it is one pack's own derby or a district or council derby. The line at the bottom says which three words the race will use.
Dens	A ready-made list from those answers, to adjust: the six Cub Scout ranks (Lion through Arrow of Light, each in its rank colour, each with a Category to match) for a pack or a district; Awana's Cubbies, Sparks, T&T, Trek and Journey; nothing yet for a school or anyone else, since their groups are their own. Rename, recolour, add or remove; each is offered the next free block of a hundred car numbers, which you can clear. An empty list is fine for a race that does not group racers.
Details	The race form — everything under The race above.

The answers become words, and only the words that differ are stored. A pack's Pinewood Derby on an ordinary install answers to "Pack", "Den" and "Car" already, so the wizard stores no override for it and the race simply inherits the install's words — changing them later in System Settings still reaches it. A Space Derby, a school, a district derby: those store the seven-word override described under The words on screen, exactly as though you had ticked Use different words for this race afterwards, and the edit form's Words and names section shows it that way.

Answer	Organization	Racing group	Vehicle
Cub Scouts, one pack's own derby	Pack	Den	—
Cub Scouts, a district or council derby	District	Rank	—
Awana	Club	Group	—
A school	School	Grade	—
Something else	Organization	Group	—
Pinewood Derby	—	—	Car
Space Derby	—	—	Rocket (with the rocket picture)
Raingutter Regatta	—	—	Boat (with the boat picture)

These are starting points, not rules: every word can be changed on the edit form afterwards, and every den on the Dens step or from Manage Dens.

Copying a previous race

Once any race exists, the wizard's first step offers Copy settings from a previous race. Pick one from the list and the questions are skipped — the previous race is the answer — and you go straight to its dens, with its settings filled in on the form.

Copied: every den, with its name, colour, Category and car number range; the scoring method, Drop worst run(s), Ties and Championship Trophies; the car numbering strategy and start number; the weight limit (or no weight check, if it had none); the race's own words, if it had any; and the location.

Not copied: the name and date, which are what make it a new race; the roster, check-in, photos, rounds, heats, results, awards and votes; the QR code display text; the running-order, trophy and name-display settings the edit form offers only after a race exists; and the lock. A race that inherited the install's words stays inheriting when copied, rather than freezing whatever they resolved to that day.

Copying last year's derby: its six dens come across, and the form opens on its scoring and numbering. The roster does not — that is this year's.

The edit form open on Scoring. The other three sections are one click away in the list on the left; Save Changes saves them all.

Event

What the race is called, when and where it runs, and which track it runs on.

Field	What it does
Lock race	Not offered until the race is created. Guards a concluded race against an accidental edit — see locking a race below. First in the form, since a finished event is the usual reason to open it again
Event Name	Names the race everywhere. Must be unique
Date & Time / Location	Shown on the Home page and printed on pit passes
Track / Timer	Which track this race runs on. The track's own lanes, timer and records live in System Settings, not here — a track is hardware in the room, shared by every race run on it
Interleave heats across every den	Off by default; only offered once the race exists. One running order across every den instead of a block per den — see Running order across groups

Scoring

How the standings are worked out, how ties are settled, and who takes which trophy.

Field	What it does
Scoring	Timed, Points, Cumulative time, or Fastest single run — see Scoring. Choose before racing starts. Every option shows its one-line description underneath it, not only the one currently picked
Drop worst run(s)	0 is off. Drops each racer's worst counted results before scoring — only once everyone who has raced has the same number of runs to drop from, with one to spare; otherwise nothing is dropped and the standings say so. See Drop the worst run
Ties	How a tied score gets settled where it decides something — see Ties below
Championship Trophies	How many cars the wizard puts into the final. About the racing, not the physical trophies — those live on the Awards page
Exclude Grand Finals winners from qualifying standings	Off by default; only offered once the race exists. Once a championship round has a winner, that car stops counting toward the standings it qualified from, so the pack champion does not also keep their own den's trophy — see Racing without being ranked
At most one trophy per racer	Off by default; only offered once the race exists. A racer who already holds an award is skipped when a later one is worked out, so a den trophy rolls down to the next-fastest car once its own winner has already taken the overall trophy — see At most one trophy per racer

Check-in

How numbers are handed out, and what the scale checks.

Field	What it does
Car Numbering	See car numbering below
Check car weights at inspection	See the weight check below

Words and names

What this race calls things, and how much of a racer's name a public screen shows. Neither control is offered until the race is created — both override an install-wide default, and there is nothing to override until the race exists.

Field	What it does
Use different words for this race	See the words on screen below
Override names on public screens for this race	See names on public screens below

Auto-advance, on the race screen itself, is also remembered per race: when on, the screen moves to the next heat ten seconds after results land.

Ties

Set once, when the race is created, and editable afterwards from the Scoring section of the edit form. Five choices, in a fieldset next to Scoring — every option shows its one-line description underneath it, not only the one currently picked:

Choice	How it settles a tie
Leave it shared	Not settled. The default: cars keep the shared rank, and a cut takes a provisional pick that stays yours to decide
Fastest single heat	Whoever's best recorded heat time is lowest
Lowest total time	Whoever's heats add up to the least total time
Countback	Most 1st-place finishes; a tie on that goes to most 2nds, and so on
Head-to-head	Among the tied cars, whoever won more of the heats they actually shared

Picking a method that needs a recorded time — Fastest single heat or Lowest total time — on a Points race running with no timer gets a warning right there in the fieldset: that combination never records a time to compare, so the method will never fire. Nothing stops you choosing it anyway; the warning is there so you find out on the form rather than on race day.

Whichever method is chosen, it settles a tie only where a tie actually decides something — the last qualifying slot in a championship round, or a speed award's recipient — and only when the recorded results actually support an answer. The full rules, including what "cannot settle it" means and where that shows up, are in When two cars tie.

The weight check

On by default at 5.0 oz — the near-universal pack rule. When a weight over the limit is typed at check-in, the box turns red and says so.

• It is a warning, never a refusal. The car can still be checked in. The inspector at the table decides; the app makes the rule visible at the moment it matters.
• The tolerance is half a hundredth of an ounce. Desk scales disagree in the last decimal place: a car displaying 5.00 always passes a 5.0 limit, and one displaying 5.01 never does.
• A weight of zero means "not weighed", not "very light" — no tick, no warning.
• Turn the check off entirely if your pack does not weigh cars.

QR code display

Two optional text fields on the race's own edit form — a headline (e.g. "Scan to Vote for Best in Show!") and a line of venue Wi-Fi guidance (e.g. "Connect to the guest Wi-Fi first") — shown on the full-screen QR code audience display view. Both are blank by default: the screen falls back to a sensible headline of its own and shows no Wi-Fi line at all. See Audience display views for what the screen actually shows and which page the code opens.

Car numbering

Choice	How numbers are handed out
Per Den	Auto number fills from each den's own range — 100–199 for the first den, 200–299 for the next. The ranges are on each den in Manage Dens, and can be changed or cleared
Global	Sequentially from one starting number, den regardless
Manual	You type every number yourself; Auto number leaves the race alone. Duplicates are allowed — which is why the check-in scanner's car number box only matches when exactly one racer holds the number

Locking a race

Once an event has concluded, Lock race — the first control in the edit form's Event section — guards against an accidental edit — a stray tap on a shared laptop weeks later, not a control for keeping anyone out. It is not offered while creating a race, only afterwards.

While a race is locked:

• Scheduling, results, racer registrations and awards cannot be changed. Every screen that would change one of those shows a Locked badge and explains why its controls are disabled.
• The race stays fully readable — the roster, standings, stats and every audience display keep working exactly as before.
• Voting and the audience displays are unaffected — a display is told what to show separately from the race's own record, and a vote is gated by its own Voting is open switch, not by the lock.
• Deleting the race is still allowed. A locked race is exactly the one an operator might delete without reading every word of a confirmation, so deleting one asks for the race's exact name to be typed first, rather than the ordinary yes/no confirmation every other race gets.
• Unlocking is the one change a locked race still accepts — from the same Lock race checkbox, now labelled Unlock race, at the top of the edit form's Event section, reached from the Roster page, from Race Control, or from a race row's ⋯ menu on Home.

A locked race is marked with a Locked badge on Home's race list, in the race picker at the top of every screen, and on Race Control's own header.

The track

Tracks live in System Settings and are shared between races — the track is hardware in the room, so a venue running two races has the same track in both.

Field	What it does
Track Name	Names it in race forms and settings
Lanes	How many lanes the track has. Schedules are built for this — lowering it mid-event brings existing heats into line, see turning down a track's lane count
Length (Feet)	How far a car travels down the track — used to work out scale speed, if that's turned on
Timer Type	Fake, plugged into this machine, plugged into the laptop running the browser, or no timer at all — see Timers and No timer below
Serial Port	Almost always blank. Fill it only to force a specific port; it is then used exactly as typed
Timer Model	Almost always Detect automatically. See the model picker
This track has a remote start gate	Enables the on-screen gate release, if the timer supports it — see the remote start gate
The timer's cable is wired backwards	Flips every result so the timer's lane 1 matches the track's highest lane, instead of rewiring the timer or renumbering the track — see reverse lane numbering
Lanes in service	Untick a lane that has stopped working. Unlike the rest of the card, this saves the moment you click it — see a lane stops working
Lane colours (optional)	Match each lane to the colour painted or taped on the physical track — see Lane colours below
Track records from past years	Records from before Trusty Track, entered by hand for the Stats page's record board. Saves as soon as you add one — see the track record

Lane colours

Most physical pinewood derby tracks — aluminum, wood, or a kit like BestTrack or Freedom Track — paint or sleeve each lane a different colour, and the wranglers, staging crew and even the announcer end up calling cars by it: "put car #12 in the blue lane." Trusty Track only ever knew lanes by number, so nothing on screen matched what was painted on the ground.

A small colour picker sits under Lane colours on the track's own card, one per physical lane — not just the lanes currently in service, since a colour is a fact about the physical lane and does not move when one goes out of service or the lane count is turned down. Use standard colours fills in the usual red/white/blue/yellow (and green/orange for a six-lane track) as a starting point; pick any lane's own colour afterwards to match your track exactly, or Clear all to go back to plain numbers. This is an ordinary field on the track's card, like Length (Feet) — it saves with the page's Save Settings button, not on click the way Lanes in service does.

Leave every lane blank and nothing changes: this is entirely optional, and a track with no colours configured looks exactly as it always has.

Once set, a small coloured dot appears beside the lane number wherever a lane is shown — the Race screen, On Deck, the audience displays, and the printed heat sheet. It is always a dot beside the number, never a colour filled in behind it: a filled badge would fight whichever theme is active, and the lane number itself is always there too, since a dot alone means nothing on a black-and-white printout or to someone who cannot tell two hues apart. See Audience display views for what a screen shows, and Printed documents for the heat sheet.

If the timer's cable is wired backwards (see the row above), lane colours still follow the track's own numbering, not the timer's — a colour is painted on the ground, and correcting the cable does not move the paint.

Scale speed

The question every scout asks after a heat is how fast that was, in real miles per hour. A pinewood derby car is a scale model — about 7 inches long against a full-size car's roughly 175 — so its heat time and the track's length are enough to work out how fast the full-size car would have to go to cover the same ground in the same time. A typical 3-second run down a 40-foot track comes out to around 200 MPH.

Show scale speed, beside Length (Feet) on the track's card, turns it on. A Scale field appears beneath it once it is, already filled in with 25 — the standard 1:25 ratio a BSA pinewood derby car is built to. That ratio is a fact about the car, not the app, so change it for anything built differently: a Space Derby rocket or a Raingutter Regatta boat is not 1:25. Leave the checkbox off if scale speed does not suit your event at all.

It needs both the checkbox on and a length recorded — a track with no length shows no speed however the checkbox is set, since there is nothing to convert from. Once both are set, the speed appears beside a heat's time on the projector view and the Last heat's times view, and the fastest heat of the race gets its own line on the Stats page.

No timer

Not every pack owns an electronic timer, and No timer — I'll enter results by hand is for that: choose it and the Race screen stops trying to arm a device at all. Instead of a "Waiting for Timer…" message, the main button on each heat is Enter Results, opening the same result screen the Override button always has — times for a Timed race, finishing order for a Points race (see Scoring, which is what points-based scoring is for).

This is different from the Fake Timer: the fake one starts heats and invents a finishing time a few seconds later, which is meant for a practice run or trying the software, not for recording a real result. No timer never invents anything — every result is exactly what was typed in.

The Free Race screen follows the same rule, with one difference: it always asks for finishing order rather than a time, whichever scoring method the race itself uses — a free heat is exhibition and is never scored, so the Timed/Points question this section answers for a real heat does not apply to it.

The Timer Model, Serial Port, This track has a remote start gate and The timer's cable is wired backwards fields disappear once No timer is chosen; none of them mean anything without a device.

The timer section of a track's card, with No timer — I'll enter results by hand chosen from the Timer Type dropdown.

The organization

Organization Name in System Settings — your pack's name, shown in the header and printed on documents. The Access panel on the same page holds the PINs; see Roles and permissions.

Names on public screens

The audience displays, the printables, and the standings export can show less of a racer's name than the roster does — useful for a race whose standings are posted on a gym wall, or emailed out, where a stranger reading it has no reason to see a child's full name. Three choices:

Choice	Shows	For
Full name	Jordan Mitchell	The default — today's behaviour, unchanged.
First name and last initial	Jordan M.	The common choice for a screen the public can see.
First name only	Jordan	A pack whose own policy says no surname on a public screen at all.

It reaches the projector, the slideshow and the award ceremony; the pit passes, driver's licences, heat sheet, results sheet and certificates; and the standings CSV export. It does not touch the roster, check-in, Race Control, or the activity log — the people running those screens need the whole name to find the right child in a queue, and all four sit behind a PIN when one is set. The printed check-in codes are the one printable left at full names too, for the same reason: they are scanned at the check-in desk to identify a racer, not carried around the venue like a pit pass.

The same choice also covers a racer's own photograph on the audience displays. A picture of a child's face beside "Jordan M." is not anonymised, so picking anything but Full name hides the racer photo there too — replaced by the same initials placeholder the roster's avatar already falls back to when no photo has been uploaded. The car photo is a different question and is never hidden. Printables keep the racer photo regardless of this setting; a pit pass is handed to the checked-in child it names, not read by a stranger on a wall.

Set install-wide in System Settings → General, under Names on public screens. A race can override that default of its own — tick Override names on public screens for this race in the Words and names section of the race's edit form (not offered on the + Create New Race form, since there is nothing to override until the race exists) and choose a value, including Full name itself if the organization default abbreviates and this one race should not. Unticking the checkbox returns to inheriting the organization's setting.

The words on screen

Trusty Track is built for Cub Scout Pinewood Derby, and "Den", "Pack" and "Car" are just the built-in words for three ideas: a group of racers who race together, the organization holding the event, and what a racer's own entry is called. A school, an AWANA club, a 4-H group, a Space Derby's rockets, a Raingutter Regatta's boats — anyone running the same kind of race — can rename all three, everywhere the app uses them: the roster, the standings, printouts, and the audience displays.

Three words, each with its own plural, since English plurals do not follow a rule a computer should be guessing at:

Word	Default	Replaces
Racing group	Den / Dens	"Den", Manage Dens, Per Den numbering, the Den column on the roster, standings and printouts
Organization	Pack / Packs	"Pack", "Top Overall (Pack)"
Vehicle	Car / Cars	"Car", car numbers on the roster and check-in, "Fastest Car" on the awards screen, and the vehicle word on printouts

Set install-wide in System Settings → General, under Use different words for "Den", "Pack" and "Car" — turning it on offers all six boxes, already filled in with the built-in words so none of them starts out blank.

Turning on custom terminology offers all six boxes at once — a singular and a plural for each word — plus the vehicle picture below them.

A race can override that default of its own — one venue running a pack derby in March and a school's own derby in May, on the same install, without either one showing the other's words. The setup wizard's Kind of event step is where a new race's words are chosen — a Space Derby held by a school says "Rocket", "Grade" and "School" from its first screen — and it stores them as this override only where they differ from the install's own words (see Creating a race). To change them afterwards, or for a race created before the wizard existed, open the edit form, go to Words and names, and tick Use different words for this race. The seven boxes are not on the create form itself, because the wizard's questions are where a new race's words come from.

Unticking the checkbox returns to inheriting — the organization's own words if it has set any, the built-in Scouting words otherwise. It does not leave the fields blank; there is no way to save an empty word — a blank box stops the save and the form says which section to look in, and the server refuses one too if it is ever asked to save one some other way.

The vehicle word has a picture to go with it: a car, a rocket, or a boat. The Vehicle picture dropdown sits under the vehicle word's two boxes and is independent of it — renaming "Car" to "Speedster" keeps whichever picture is already chosen, and picking the rocket picture does not touch the word. It draws the small line-art mark on the pit pass footer and on the heat sheet and results sheet's masthead; the certificate does not carry it. A car until you change it.

One label stays fixed for everyone: Category, the field on a racing group that a Cub Scout rank or a school grade goes in — see Adding a New Den. It is a detail on one racing group, not vocabulary a whole screen is built from, so it keeps one name regardless of the words above.