What problem is Race Club solving?

Have you ever tried racing your friends, organizing your local cycling association's or running club's race?

Amateur racing is fun, but not easy to organize.

Race Club is here to help with easy race management and time tracking.

The Story of My Local Race

My friends and I tried and failed many times until we tried Race Club.

First, we tried with Strava segments. We created segments for our mountain bike race. Each segment was an enduro-style race segment. We hoped that Strava would log all our runs and we'd compare times in the end.

Oh boy, were we wrong... That failed miserably. Some of us weren't even recorded by Strava segments at all. And some of the slowest riders were supposedly faster than some of the fastest.

Then we tried marking time on our own. Everyone was supposed to record their own time using a stopwatch on their watch or phone. That turned out to be more challenging than we expected and it didn't go smoothly. Even though we had just a few riders, it was still a mess. I can only imagine what it would be for a larger event.

We researched some existing solutions. They were either very expensive or not good enough. There are some rumors floating around that renting professional hardware for racing is more than $3000. And some non-professional solutions require payment upfront without even knowing if it will work.

I've also seen some plastic readers used by some smaller associations, but it looks like those are low-frequency RFID readers, therefore a lot of racers lose precious time moving the tag around, trying to find a good spot on the reader where it would eventually be read.

Then we tried an early version of Race Club.

The plan was to have two people marking times for the others. One person would be at the start of each stage, and the other at the finish.

Before we started, we placed adhesive NFC tags on each bike and scanned them with an Android phone, assigning each tag to each racer. Those tags are cheap, so it didn't matter if they got lost, and we didn't care about collecting them back. The only catch was placing them on a non-metal surface because they wouldn't work otherwise. A good thing about Race Club is that you can use multiple devices for everything. You can divide the work between multiple people with their own phones.

I won't lie, it didn't start well. The first stage was a failure. There was no cell reception, and caching required an extra step we forgot to do, so time tracking on our first stage failed. But then we managed to find cell reception, take the extra step required at that time and get everything we needed cached. And it worked like a charm after that. We had two stages timed perfectly and displayed in real time on a page everyone had access to. Our friends who missed the race could see the track times in real time and comment in our group chat.

Since then, we have introduced multiple improvements to Race Club. There should be no problems with cell reception. Everything should be cached on race day just by opening any page on the app.

Currently, Race Club is the best and the most affordable (free for small events) race organizing and time tracking solution. And it's completely open to any suggestions and ideas. Please feel free to contact us and explain what you need and if this might not fully cover your needs.

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