All Racing Club Manager is concerned about is the addition of a new track and the different layouts, of which there are 12 total. Although along with the new track, Forza Motorsport 6 includes some cool new race-inspired functionality and NASCAR vehicles. Hopefully some NASCAR themed leagues will start cropping up on Racing Club Manager and maybe I can participate 🙂
Any Forza Game, Any Car, Fantasy, Realistic… It doesn’t matter. This year we want to encourage Forza painters to come up with their own versions of what a Racing Club Manager livery would look like. Our primary colors are dark blue, orange, white but that doesn’t mean you absolutely need to use those colors in your livery. Think, “What scheme will make my livery stand out from the rest?” and go from there. Last year‘s winner SCS Skreamies won because he had a super clean, realistic livery. Although we are encouraging you to think outside the box this year, that doesn’t mean that a really great clean racing livery cannot get the win.
This year’s livery contest is going to be Forza-based since every one of last year’s entries came from Forza painters and the top 9 clubs on racingclubmanager.com are Forza clubs. So you could consider this sort of a Forza appreciation event.
The winner of the contest will receive $10 USD via PayPal and will ultimately be judged by me, the creator of Racing Club Manager. I will however hold a fan vote and take the fan’s votes and comments into consideration before making my final decision.
Entries can be submitted to Twitter, Facebook, or Reddit by May 6th 2016. That gives everyone 8 weeks to come up with an idea and execute it. Monday May 9th I will declare a winner and send the money via PAYPAL so make sure you’re set up to receive money.
Below are the entries from last year and some other liveries I have made in Forza just to get the creative juices flowing.
Release 8 looks to have been a success thus far, but I am always looking to improve on the site and have come up with a new list of “To Dos” for Release 9 which I hope to complete by mid November.
Tweak to Avg Finish Chart on Racer Detail screen
Right now we look back 60 days and try to get the avg finish position and then start building the graph. Well with new clubs you won’t have 60 days worth of data, but you might still have enough data to show on the graph. This update will scale the graph based on how much data you have. As long as you have at least 4 result sets a graph will be drawn. The graph will only show up to 60 days worth of data starting from the date of your most recent race.
Prevent admins from accidentally adding same member multiple times and Prevent members from asking to join if they are already a member
I don’t know about all the other clubs but I run into issues with this all of the time. It would be nice to get a message saying that this member already exists in the club so that I don’t accidentally add them twice. Sometimes you just forget if you’ve added the new guys yet or not.
After series type has been selected(Teams, Multi-Class) allow admins to skip right to editing team/class members to save them a step in the process.
This issue was also brought up by me and I am finally deciding to address it. Right now when you have a Teams or Multi-class series, when you want to edit the members of the team/class you need to click through the Edit Series Type screen first. Although the ability to change the series type is needed, we don’t need to go through that step every time. After this update, if you have selected Teams or Multi-class as your series type, you will go straight to the edit team/class members screen and will have the option to change the series type from there if needed.
Add ability to highlight a racer on club leaderboard, so that when you toggle through the months/years it is easier to spot a specific racer.
This should prove to be useful. Racing Club Manager can’t provide ALL the reports a club could ever want, so being able to highlight a racer’s row in the leaderboards will help you find that racer when changing the date range of the leaderboards. Sometimes I like to see how one specific person has been evolving over the life of the club and this will help me do that quicker.
Although this seems like kind of a boring release, I do believe that it will help with the sites overall functionality and support the goal of being easy to use. A member of a club also had some suggestions that we will be implementing once we figure out the final requirements. That might push the release back further than mid November. If that’s the case then I will try to break up the releases and deploy anything I’ve already finished before starting things that might take a long time.
Hello all, it has been quite a while since I released a site update. In this blog post I am going to show some screen shots and take you through the details of Release 8.
The first thing to take notice of is the new login screen. I made it bigger to accommodate mobile users. it’s not often that I login on my phone, usually to review a join request, but this new UI should make it a little bit less annoying. 
The biggest focus of this release was to allow clubs to assign a platform so that people who are looking for a club to race with will know if you are on PC, Playstation or XBOX. Below you’ll see the Admin Club Profile screen where you can now assign a platform. The choices are PC, Playstation 3, Playstation 4, XBOX 360, XBOX One. As part of the release I am auto-assigning a platform where a game only exists on one platform. Forza Horizon 2 and Project CARS clubs will have to log in and assign it on their own since those games exist on multiple platforms.
Below, you can see some screen shots where I have implemented showing the platform your club uses. To save space on the screen I decided to use icons instead of text.
The second focus of this release was allowing clubs to record penalty points per race. Penalty points can be recorded when filling out the results for a race. Now, if there is a major incident or rules violation clubs can specify a number of points to remove from a player for a given race. In favor of full disclosure I encourage clubs to include why the penalty points were given in the post-race write-up.
In addition to the platform and penalty points changes there were updates made to leaderboards. I added a column that shows the number of races attended to the main club leaderboard and the leaderboards on the series detail screen. Since I am showing the final number of points a racer received in a series, it made sense to show how many races it took for the racer to get there.
Thank you all for taking the time to read this and if you ever have questions, comments, or suggestions on ways to improve the site, contact me any time on any of the social media platforms and I will get back to you as soon as possible.
Release 7 just went out today and it pleases me very much to be able to put out those updates and I think it adds a lot of value to the site. Release 8 isn’t going to be as spectacular, but it includes some stepping stones that will allow us to build a better advanced search.
In Release 8 I need to allow clubs to specify the platform on which the club is based. Games like Forza and Gran Turismo won’t have any options to choose from, but Project CARS and the Formula 1 games will.
Right now the advanced search is useful for finding a club that has an upcoming race, but if you are searching for a Project CARS race there is no way to filter by PC, XBOX One, or PS4 and there needs to be. Updating the advanced search is not going to happen as part of Release 8 but as part of Release 9. The advanced search is going to be completely overhauled and will take a while to complete.
Another addition for Release 8 is to show the game and platform on the club home page. I haven’t figured out the exact placement for this yet. I’ll provide screenshots when the release date approaches.
Release 8 will also allow clubs to apply penalty points to racers in each race. Right now clubs can give out bonus points, but not take any away. These points will be taken into account for series and race standings and in all leaderboards.
The last item for Release 8 is to add number of races attended to the series leaderboard on the series details page.
To recap, Release 8 will include:
This is a fairly straight forward release and shouldn’t take too long to complete. I can’t give a hard release date yet, but I can estimate it should be ready before the end of August.
Thanks for reading and please share any feedback you have on the site. If you are ever clicking through the site and say to yourself, “I wish this site did this, it would be so much better,” then please contact me.
Release 7 is all about individual racer statistics. Until now we have had the leaderboards page and the racers pages, and they do provide some good data to pour over, but it doesn’t really let you evaluate a racer’s performance at-a-glance. The following post will detail all of the features of the new “Racer Detail” page.
The Racer Detail Page
Here is the racer detail page viewed in a dialog box. At the top left of the dialog you can see an icon with 4 arrows pointing outwards. Clicking that icon will break the page out of its dialog and open in a full web page. The full page view is good when studying the Average Finish chart which we will discuss later.
At the top of the page you can see the racer’s name or gamer ID and their status in the club they belong to.
Below that we have 3 dark blue boxes, Series Won, Races Won, and Attendance.
Series Won will show how many series this racer has won, rapidbushnell has never won a series 😦 In parenthesis you can see what the series winning percentage is. If rapidbushnell had won 5 series out of 10 that he attended, the percentage would be 50%.
Races Won is the same as Series Won, but showing data for individual races. rapidbushnell has won 2 races, which is only 2% of all the races he has attended.
The Attendance box is divided by Series and Races. Shown here, rapidbushnell attended at least 1 race in 23 distinct series held by this club, which is 85% of all series this club had scheduled. rapidbushnell has attended 85 races, which is 67% of all races ever held by this club. These numbers do not take into account races or series that are scheduled but have not yet been completed.
Graphs
The Winners Circle pie graph allows anyone to see how often this racer gets Gold, Silver, Bronze, DNF, and Non-Podium finishes. The large dark blue slice above represents the non-podium finishes. The tiny black slice represents DNFs. Each slice in the graph can be clicked and a list of races will populate in the table on the left. You can click into any of those races and see the full results of that race and the series standings up to that point. This graph really highlights the at-a-glance evaluation that we are striving for with this release. You can immediately tell that rapidbushnell rarely podiums, but consistently finishes races to completion.
The Average Finish line graph shows the change in the racer’s overall average finish position after each race. The Y-axis shows the range of finish positions that this racer falls within. On average rapidbushnell finishes between 5th and 6th place, but closer to 6th. The X-axis shows the date MM/DD of each race and the actual position achieved. While studying this graph you can see that before his race on 6/1 his average finish position was around 5.85 and that on 6/1 he finished in 9th place which brought his average up to 5.9. This graph currently only looks at the past 60 days, but we have plans to expand the capabilities of this graph in the near future. Although rapidbushnell doesn’t finish low enough to really affect this graph in a major way, you can at-a-glance see where he is most likely to finish during a given race.
The racer detail page is built so that we can add new graphs when we find that they could be useful, or upon request. Thank you for reading this post and I hope it helps explain some things if they weren’t obvious. If you have further questions or suggestions just leave a comment or contact us: rcm@racingclubmanager.com
Details about Release 6 are here! This release contains some useful functionality for admins as well as non-admin users. I’ll tell you about the changes we are implementing for non-admin users first.
I have been using Racing Club Manager to track Forza 5 data since before the site had even launched. In that 8 months or so I have recorded quite a bit of data and I noticed that the Series page was loading slowly. My club only has 3 or 4 active series in a given month so the sluggishness had to be coming from trying to load up all of the inactive series at the same time as the active ones. The quickest fix I could think of was to only load the active series first and to wait until the viewer actually wanted to see the inactive series before starting to load them. I added a button labeled “Show Inactive Series…” at the bottom of the active series rows. This is only a temporary fix for this issue and I will address the loading times at another time in the near future. Honestly the Series page could use some renovations.
The admins are getting some functionality tweaks on the Manage Races screen. First off, I am replacing the “Available Racers,” mutli-select control with a scroll-able div element. The reason for this is that multi-select controls do not work on some(all?) mobile devices therefore eliminating the ability to record results from your phone/tablet. Recording results from your phone/tablet is going to be a pain no matter what interface I come up with, but at least now admins will have the choice. As a side-effect of the user interface change, there is a bonus feature. Admins can select multiple available racers without holding control or shift(shift now doesn’t work) and the order you select the racers in, will be their assigned finish position. Before this change you could select, for example: 5 racers and move them all over to the results, but they wouldn’t necessarily be assigned a finish position in the order that you selected them. This cool new side-effect should make recording results just a little bit easier on the admins.
I’m going to schedule this release for Friday July 10th at 11:00am Eastern US. It should be complete and tested before then, but July 4th weekend and the days leading up to it are always hectic, so better safe than sorry. I would hate to tell you the earlier and then have to push it back a week.
Thanks for reading and using the site! Just wait until I reveal what I have planned for Release 7. STATS! STATS! STATS!
Release 4 is finally out and I got all of the details for the changes that are included and there are quite a few.
Manage Races Screen
This screen shot of the updated Manage Races Screen is divided by a yellow vertical line.
On the left side I circled the 2 sections of interest. The larger circle shows two expanded drop-down lists. One list shows options for “Time” and “Distance”. If you choose Time, you get to specify how many hours and minutes the race should last. In the other drop-down list labeled “Results” you get to specify if the results should record how many laps, kilometers, meters, miles, or feet each racer competed during the race’s time span. The smaller circle on the left side of the screen shot shows where you record each racer’s distance and just left of the circle is a new field Best Lap.
On the right side of the screenshot you can see what it looks like if you choose Distance for race length. You cannot see it in this screen shot, but if you were to choose Distance for length of race, you would be able to record the Best Lap and Overall Time for each racer in the results table.
Race Details Screen
The race details screen now reflects the length of race in the header of the page. The left screen is 20 Laps and the right is a 1 hour 30 minute timed race.
Both sides show columns for Best Lap, while the Distance race shows a column for Overall time and the Timed race shows a column for Distance traveled.
Another small detail you may have noticed is the presence of the 2 buttons just below the orange Results bar. The button on the left, when clicked, will show you the results for this race. The button on the right will show you the series standings after this race. This page needed the horizontal space because of the new columns, so this is the current solution. This may evolve over time.
Leaderboard Screen
I was able to add a new stat to the Leaderboard screen. Podium % shows you how often a racer finishes 3rd or better within the given leaderboard parameters. This screenshot shows just February 2015, but could be expanded to show all of 2015 or any other month a race result had been recorded. If you have a lot of results recorded over the course of a year, you would be able to see if a racer’s podium % was getting better, worse or staying about the same.
Racers Screen
The Racers screen is like a leaderboard for the entire lifespan of the club, so it is a good place to determine overall podium % and another new stat called “Rival.” Rival shows you which other racer finishes 1 spot ahead of you the most. In the screenshot the first racer “Buddy7085” has a rival “B1G5TIG”. Imagine that B1G5TIG has finished just ahead of Buddy7085 on 6 races so far and other racers have only done it 3 or 4 times. Since B1G5TIG has done it the most he becomes the rival. The club I race with finds this stat really fun because it gives you someone to try your hardest against in-race. Whether you are trying to get rid of your current rival or trying to stay as someone else’s I feel like this is the first time an online statistic has impacted in-game play in a meaningful way, at least for our club.
I am really excited to be able to deliver these new enhancements and hopefully it adds to your game play experience. I will be prioritizing what small updates should go out next and also what bigger features should make it into Release 5. I will let everyone know as soon as I figure it out.
Thanks for reading!
No sorry I don’t have a release date yet, but I do have a screenshot of the manage races screen to show you. I outlined the sections that have changed in red and orange below.
In red, it used to only allow you to specify a number of laps. Now we have the ability to define the length of a race as either a distance or a time. Time is recorded in hours and minutes and you also have the option to define what the unit of measure will be in the results. As people who run endurance races know, if you race for 2-3 hours you would record your results in feet or meters traveled over the course of that 2-3 hours. You can choose between laps, miles, feet, kilometers, and meters for units of measure and can record up to 3 decimal places for accuracy.
In the orange, I have added new fields to the results capture area. You can now record each racers best lap time and depending on whether your race is based on distance or time, you can record the total time taken to complete the distance or the total distance traveled in the amount of race time.
It seems we might be running out of room in the results capture area, so when we eventually add more fields we might have to change our user interface to allow more room and ease of use.
I still need to work on the race details and series details screens, as well as the club home pages to implement showing the data that can now be captured. We are still probably a few weeks away from release but I will update everyone on a more stable time frame soon.
Thanks for reading this and for choosing Racing Club Manager to assist you in your digital racing lives. As always any feedback or suggestions on how to make this site work better for you is greatly appreciated, so contact me ASAP.
Release #2 is LIVE! and I’m here to update you on the changes that were made. I posted an update on January 30th, that explains the admin side of creating teams. You can find that post here. Since that part was covered I’ll be covering Multi-Class and output.
Above is an image of the Manage Races screen. You can see that we are editing a race in a multi-class series. I have added to the results 2 racers from the Prototype 1 class and 1 racer from the GTS class. If I add the selected racer from the left who is in class GT3, he should automatically be assigned position 1 for that class. This functionality should help reduce time when entering multi-class results. Just be careful when removing racers because when you add again it may not have the correct default position. I plan on improving that issue in the future, but it seems like a fringe case to me.
This image is the Race Details screen, on the left are results from a team-enabled race and on the right are results from a multi-class race. For team results you’ll see normal race results, but we’ve added a way to see your bonus points and the real finish position. You can also see your individual series standings and the change since the previous race. Below that are the team race results and team series standings. For multi-class results we break up the individual results into the classes and to the right of that we calculate the overall series standings.
On a side note, in the above-left image you can see that I re-labeled the Series Description and Race Description sections to better reflect what you should see when you click to expand those areas.
There are some things I know I need to work on soon and I would like to list them here to hopefully head off some questions.
What is Next?
Funny you should ask… The next release will involve adding support for qualifying. I haven’t worked out all the details yet, but will be working with a GranTurismo racing league to nail down the particulars. At a minimum you will be able to define where a racer qualified for each race and it will show their qualifying position in the results. This release will probably expand and depending on what actually goes into the release it could be released as early as the first weekend in March or as late as April 4th.
After that I would like to work on an update to allow gathering of additional stats for endurance racing. Once that gets published there won’t be too many other vital pieces of data to be collected and more work can go into output, reports, searches, etc.
Racing Club Manager 