RaceClocker News #20

Easy manual sports timing

👋 Hello and welcome to our intermittently appearing newsletter with news, events, updates and other information about our race timing app. #happytiming

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Hello 2025 🚀

Thank you all race directors, timekeepers, coaches and sports event organisers for another year of solid growth and performance of RaceClocker. This year, we welcomed over a thousand new race managers to our timing solution, made a ton of software releases to improve quality and robustness, and also shipped many new features small and large.

Since our last update we’ve been busy, working hard on a couple of big new features that got released recently and are covered in this episode. For the new year we got many and some quite big plans again, and we would welcome all of you to help us prioritize. Let us know what you like our team to focus on, and fill in the poll below. 📣

Shiny new lap timer ⏳

Improving manual timing for lap races, as opposed to races with the start, finish and split points all at different locations, was one of the Big Initiatives we set for ourselves for 2024 (all got done btw).

Lap timer includes a row of timer buttons for each lap per participant

Lap races can be set to each lap having the same distance, typical for races where a lap course is covered multiple times, or each lap can be defined separately, with both a name and a custom distance. Custom laps enable many different types of races where a race consist of multiple stages, each with its own name, description and distance. To learn more about lap racing, take a look at the video tutorial.

Hyrox and other cardio fitness races 💪

A special case for our new lap timer is to support Hyrox and similar cardio / fitness race types. Manually timing a Hyrox, CrossFit or similar event is now a breeze with RaceClocker. Large scale events are usually scored with chip timing, but for many smaller scale events that’s not feasible. RaceClocker now provides an easy-to-use alternative for the long tail of smaller races. The participant experience is high class including live results, individual score sheets etc. A short tutorial on the specific features in RaceClocker for this race type is here.

Hyrox race - photo credit Gunnar Ries zwo

Keyboard timing

Most of our timekeepers are using a smartphone. Our UI is therefore optimized for touch and small screen use. However, since RaceClocker is 100% web based, timekeepers can use any device for race timing. Especially for races where timekeepers can sit dry and behind a table, it’s much more convenient - and also in many cases more precise - to do the timing on a laptop or desktop computer. To support this mode even better, we’ve added keyboard support to all common timing views (including the new lap timer). In this tutorial you can see it in action.

Accurate and fast timing using the keyboard for bib number entry

Integrations 🏃🏾

We released some months ago our first ‘integration’. Race directors on RunSignup can now import their events straight into RaceClocker, including all race meta data and the full start list.

A demo of the user experience of the race director explains how effortless the link between race registration and timing in RaceClocker is made. We are planning to expand the list of integrations with other race registration services in the course of the new year.

Events timed with RaceClocker during fall ‘24

And some more new bits

• The live results page got completely rebuild (in just 2 weeks time). After suffering from server overload during one of the busiest weekends of the year, back in November, we bit the bullet and moved the load of calculating the complex results view (ordering, grouping, filtering, handicap calculation etc.) from the server to the client. As a side effect, it improved the user experience a lot!

• Adding a location to your race is now easier as we included Google location search in the map picker:

  

  Inline place search to set your event location

• The start list can now be randomly ordered per group. So when your start list is either grouped by category or by wave, a random draw (and subsequent manual drag/drop ‘seating’) can be made by selecting the magic wand icon at the group level.

  

Our roadmap for 2025 👋🏽

Next to many smaller improvements we got in the cooker, we’re playing with some bigger ideas for 2025 to bring to the manual race timing business. We would much appreciate your input on what you would like us to develop in the year ahead. If your wish is not on the list below, then just drop us a note.

#happytiming #raceclocker

Made with 🖤 and ☕ from the Netherlands by Cees van Dok and Lucas Tijssen and the RaceClocker support team. Our mission is to become the best manual timing solution race managers could wish for.