A big part of how the series can make championships like the George Mangan fair to all competitors involves the careful application of handicaps. But how do they work? How can we avoid sandbagging? Well, here’s how.
When you finish a race, you will have taken a certain length of time to complete all the laps. That time will be the shortest for the first place driver, and longer for all the drivers behind them who finished on the same lap. This is a way to think of your “scratch” finish, but it’s only here that the work begins.
For every driver, we first normalise their race time to accord with the normal of laps they have done, to include drivers who have been lapped in the running. Then, we multiply everyone’s race time by their specially calculated “handicap fraction”, a number between 0 and 1. Tabling out the resulting numbers, we can see who has, with weighting, taken the least time to finish! It’s as simple as that!
For first time entrants, their handicaps must be estimated. What we do is start everyone at the median of all handicaps for their first race in the HRCA, and then work out, for the two races or hill-climbs of their first weekend, the average how much those times would need to be multiplied by to reduce it to the fastest time. Thankfully, the automated fill and reference functions of Microsoft Excel makes this easy work.
This average then serves as their “handicap fraction” for their next weekend. From then on, their existing handicap is repeatedly added to the handicap gaps of their next start, and divided by the number of values to find the average. In this way, evolving differences in performance can be reflected in a fluid, evolving handicap.
Updated: 7th Jan 2024