One lap mat has to tell one lap from the next, and the only thing it has to go on is time. Get that one setting right and lap racing is easy. Get it wrong and every rider is wrong.
If the count is already wrong, go straight to The lap count is wrong.
Choose the format first
On the race, three formats matter here:
- Laps to a count — first to complete a set number of laps.
- Laps in a time — most laps inside a set period. A twelve hour event is
12:00. - Standard — first over the finish line.
A criterium is Standard. Laps are still counted, so you can see who was lapped, but the placings are finish times and not lap counts. Setting a crit up as "laps to a count" is the classic mistake: the moment the leaders lap the field, a lap-counted race has the wrong winner.
The one setting that matters
Laps are counted as visits, not reads. A mat reads a chip half a dozen times as somebody crosses it, and Podium collapses reads arriving close together into one visit. The lap gap is what decides "close together". It defaults to two minutes.
It must stay shorter than your fastest lap. That is the whole rule.
- Gap too short — one pass counts several times and everybody has far too many laps.
- Gap too long — two laps get swallowed into one and everybody is short. Worse, a gap long enough to swallow a lap will also drag the first lap into the start, which moves that rider's start time to when they came back round.
Set it off the fastest lap anybody will ride, not the average. The leaders are the ones it breaks on.
Lapping, and being lapped
A lapped rider is not a scoring problem, it is a display one. The mat reads everybody the same way regardless of who is on what lap.
What it does mean:
- In a crit, the placings are finish times, so lapped riders come out where they crossed.
- In a lap-counted race, count and time both matter. Whoever completes the set laps first wins, and a rider lapped out has fewer.
- Watch the leaders for a lap count that stops climbing. A leader stuck on the same count while everybody else advances is nearly always a read being missed on one particular pass, not a rider who has stopped.
Where extra laps come from
Two causes, both common, and the reads tell you which:
- Two mats close enough that both caught them. The lap mat and something else are seeing the same pass.
- A lap mat that also covers the start line. The start counts as a lap.
Filter the raw reads for that number and look at which points they appear on — see The raw reads, and changing a result by hand. One number's reads will show it in seconds.
Long events
For a twelve or twenty-four hour race, two things change:
- Battery and weather stop being background concerns. See Weather and batteries.
- Watch the results through the event, not at the end. A mat that dies at hour three costs you everything after hour three unless somebody notices. Its own log will still have the reads, so it is recoverable — but only if you notice before you pack the box up. See Back everything up.
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