Understanding penalties in SmartRace
This feature is part of the SmartRace Champions Club. This is a big package with cool extensions, which you can conveniently add in the form of a monthly or annual subscription in the app and of course cancel at any time.
Did you ever wish there was a way to bring more discipline to your race track? Well, you could use penalties like in real life. Penalties in SmartRace can be used to impose lap deduction or time penalties on drivers. Penalties are only available in races. Tap the “Penalties” button on the bottom right of the race screen to open the penalties dialog. The dialog consists of two parts:
- A list of controllers with assigned drivers – tap a driver to select them for penalty selection.
- A list of possible penalties – tap a penalty to impose it on the selected driver.
Tap a driver first and then a penalty of your choice. You can impose multiple penalties in one run by tapping a driver, then the penalty then the next driver and the next penalty and so on. When a penalty has been selected for a driver, a little red or green flag will show up next to the controller id in the penalty dialog. As long as you don’t confirm your selection by tapping “Confirm” on the bottom of the screen, the selection is not applied.
You can choose from these penalties:
- Time penalty – this will impose a time penalty on the driver. They will have to go to the pit lane and wait for the amount of time you selected. Time penalties will add up, meaning that you can impose multiple time penalties on the same driver and the seconds will add up. The driver has to wait for the given amount of time and refueling and tire changes will only start after the penalty has been served completely.
- Lap deduction – this will immediately substract one lap from the lap count of the selected driver (when confirmed).
- Time Credit – if you imposed a time penalty on a driver by accident, you can revert it by giving them a time bonus. Example: You’ve given a driver a 10 seconds time penalty but really only wanted to give them a 5 seconds time penalty. In this case you would just open the penalties dialog again and select a 5 seconds time credit. Confirm it and the driver will then only be left with a 5 seconds time penalty.
Once you confirm the selection, the selected penalties will be imposed and displayed in the race screen.
Automatic penalty for speeding in the pit lane
In addition to the penalties that can be imposed manually, drivers can also be penalized automatically if they drive too fast in the pit lane. For this purpose, a minimum combined lap time can be set for each track in the track database (in milliseconds). This combined lap time is the sum of the lap time before a pit stop and the lap time after a pit stop. At the start of a race, you can then specify in the corresponding selection box whether and, if so, what penalty a driver should receive for falling short of this combined lap time time.
The duration of the pit stop is automatically subtracted from the lap time when checking if a penalty should be applied, so it doesn’t matter how long the pit stop was.
Example: Let’s assume a fast lap time on your track is 10 seconds. You could therefore set a combined lap time of 20 seconds in the settings for your track. Then you start a race and specify that drivers should receive a 5-second time penalty for speeding in the pit lane. During the race, driver 1 now drives into the pits. The lap time when entering the pit lane (i.e. from the finish line to the tank sensor) is 9 seconds because he drove into the pits very quickly. The lap time on the exit (i.e. from the fuel sensor to the finish line) is 10 seconds. The sum of the two laps is 19 seconds and therefore one second below the minimum combined lap time – the driver receives a time penalty.
