Success is in the preparation
A short informational post on how the top performing teams succeed in Red Clay Rally.
Year after year, teams (and we) have refined different methods used use to calculate what speed we need to be going using the GPX file given.
As of 2024 we believe the best method to calculate this is to convert your .gpx file to a .csv file.
A .csv file is a "comma separated values" file. Basically a nerdy way of saying a spreadsheet.
I personally use software called GPSBabel to perform this action. I am sure there are several more free alternatives.
Once converted to a csv file it can be opened in Microsoft Excel. A good free alternative is Google Sheets. Once inside one of these programs. You can view every metric preserved by the GPX file. Elevation, average elevation, moving speed, stopped time, and all kinds of other useless (to you) information.
You are specifically looking at the coordinates, and the time it took us to get there, MINUS our stopped time. Why's that though? Well, we stop for all kinds of stuff. Cutting trees, lunch, talking to park officials, and even winching.
You though, you don't get that privilege.
These coordinates you can then copy and place along the track as waypoints inside your mapping app at any interval your team sees fit. Some teams do 5 mins, some do 20.. it's up to teams and how accurate they're trying to be. Once removing our stopped times you are able to compare the clearly visible timestamps within the spreadsheet to determine if you are going too slow or too fast by comparing it to the timestamps at each coordinate along our track.
You still with me?...
An RCR "Perfect" time is a constant moving flow from beginning to end, matching our speed exactly for every moving second we traveled. No time allotted for lunch, refueling, breaking or winching. If we slowed, you slow. If we sped quickly up something, you do too. If we stopped however, this time must be subtracted from your calculations. EVEN times we stopped to winch.
In other words if you winch up something, you need to try to make up the time you took winching BEFORE the next checkpoint.
The clock resets upon reaching the next checkpoint so if you were behind, you no longer need to try to make up time.
If we clearly took a short little wrong turn, you obviously won't take that wrong turn, but the clock kept moving... so you calculate that into it too. Simply slow up for a few seconds to account for our wrong turn as you continue along the track.
If we were stopped, as in not moving forward, for any reason, it's not counted in the perfect time. In years past we used to keep the clock rolling so long as we were ATTEMPTING to move forward. Not anymore. Moving is good. Stopped is bad.
So if you really desire to be competitive and are ready to stop relying on luck and a little pseudo-math and frustration to place well, take the time to dissect our track.
It will bring your team from "mediocrity" to "serious contender" after just a few short hours of studying numbers.