Detect uncounted laps and react to it
How and why do uncounted laps happen?
Due to how a Carrera Digital track works and which hardware it uses, uncounted laps may happen mainly because of one of these reasons:
- The car doesn’t pass the finish line in a straight direction. This will most likely happen if you have a corner directly before the finish line which causes drifts and lets the cars cross the finish line sideways. In this case the car will not trigger the finish line sensor correctly.
- The power is being cut off right before a car crosses the finish line. In this case, the car will sometimes slide across the finish line, but the sensor doesn’t have power and won’t thus be triggered. This case is the most common one.
How can SmartRace help to detect uncounted laps?
There are two ways to help with uncounted laps. You might want to configure SmartRace to show a little checkered flag indicator next to the driver in the race screen whenever a car crosses the finish line (settings > race screen). This indicator stays visible for up to 5 seconds and will always stay as long as a race is suspended. With this, each driver can check if their lap has been counted in case of a race suspension.
If you own a check lane (which is a track piece from Carrera to measure split sector times), SmartRace can utilize it to check for uncounted laps. If you enable the split sector detection (settings > driving), SmartRace will check if Sector 1 was crossed before crossing the finish line before. You can decide how the app should react to it:
- Announce the uncounted lap via voice over and show a notice in the race display.
- Announce/notice as above, but additionally suspend the race
- Announce/notice as above, but automatically add a lap for the affected driver
