You can now automatically split bigger groups over multiple sessions, proceed to next round based on some settings and merge participants in the final.
Starting from version 6.20.04.06, we have a completely new advanced and automatic Grand Prix system. In this article, you can follow the various steps.
1) Grand Prix: Create all the sessions and book the first round
The first step is to create all the sessions for the whole grand Prix, and book the participants already inside the first round of sessions. On the “Product Entry’, there is a new field, called Session Creation Mode. You can choose between OnePerGroup, or One. OnePerGroup creates a session for every group (for warmup, qualification rounds, etc) and One creates only 1 joint session. Choose this option if you want to merge multiple groups into 1 single final.
Then you create a reservation and add all the persons to this reservation as usual. Before, if you had a capacity of 10 participants, you had to select persons 1-10 and confirm them into a session, and do the same for every group. Now you can just select everyone and press the new ‘Split Groups’ button.
The system will now create all sessions already, and book all participants into the first round. Don’t worry if you have already reservations or sessions with participants in this time, the system will skip these. In this case you book 30 participants, into sessions with a capacity of 10, so you’ll have 3 groups.
To decide the groupsize, the system will take the minimum capacity of the session above the reservation, and the product entry configured on the Grand Prix. So if your session has a capacity of 15, and the product entry has 10, it will create groups of maximum 10 people (if your product capacity is set to -1, it will always take the capacity of the session.
Select the product you’d like to use and the system will create all heats. In this case the product consists of 1 Warm-up per group, 2 qualification sessions and 1 joint final. Result:
If your first round contains multiple sessions per group, you need to decide if participants will stay in the same group for all their sessions, or they will be mixed.
When you choose same groups, participants will be shuffled within their group, so the average of your starting positions within all your sessions is the same for everyone.
When you choose different groups, this will also happen, but we will also make sure that you’re with different participants every time, and that everyone has more or less the same waiting time between their sessions.
2) Grand Prix: Define your strategy for the next rounds
You can fully configure how you want the system to proceed to the next round. To do this, go to Settings => Activities => Grand Prix Strategies. You’ll see all your current strategies, and you add new ones as well.
Sorting
This will define how participants will be ordered before booking them into the next round. If you choose manual, they will be shuffled randomly.
Group Creation
Do you want to create new groups for the next round, or keep the same groups as in the previous round.
Participant Allocation
If you choose a sorting, how do you want the participant to be allocated to the next sessions. Let’s say you have 30 participants, for 3 Qualifiers. They will first be sorted, and then allocated based on this setting.
Sequential means the best 10 will go into Qualifier 1, 11-20 will go into Qualifier 2, and 21-30 will go into Qualifier 3.
Cascade means 1-4-7-10-… will go into Qualifier 1, 2-5-8-11-… will go into Qualifier 2, and 3-6-9-12-… will go into Qualifier 3
Random means it will be completely random and again the system will make sure the average start position and the average times between 2 sessions will be equal for everyone, and that you’re with different participants in all your sessions.
Inverse Allocation
After the participants are divided into the groups, their start order will be reversed. So the best participant from the previous round will start last in this round.
Maximum Drivers
This is mostly for the joint final. You can choose the amount of drivers that proceed to this final. Let’s say you have 14 drivers, but the session capacity is 10. The system will make 2 groups of 7. Then for the final, you can choose between SameAsRounds (so the best 7 participants will proceed to final) or SessionCapacity (so the best 10 will proceed to the final).
Default strategy per entry product
On every entry product, you can define a default grand prix strategy that will be highlighted when you proceed to the next round. This is optional, but might help you to not make mistakes.
3) Grand Prix: Proceed to next round
Whenever all sessions in the current round are done, you can proceed to the next round and create all participants. You can do this both from the Booking or from the Timing, by right-clicking any session of the current round and then pressing ‘Proceed to next round’.
It will ask which strategy you want to use, and if you have a default one for this round, it will be highlighted. Select the strategy you want to use, and all drivers will be created and linked to their bill lines.
Now all participants in the next round are there and you can start the next session. If for some reason you wan’t to change the allocation afterwards, you can just right-click the previous session again and choose a new strategy and everything will be recalculated. This will only work if the participants in the new round don’t have any laps yet of course.
Done !
If you have any questions about this functionality, don’t hesitate to contact us at support@bmileisure.com