This post is another “interim/teaser” type I’m posting real quick before what promises to be a very tough week at work. I spent some time on Sunday in the early afternoon-quite a bit of time, actually-working on my spreadsheets for the big upcoming sports car tournament. The last time around I took a short cut and just ran down the racing numbers in numerical order to create Groups A, B, and C, something I of course couldn’t do with the muscle car fleet since they don’t have racing numbers! But it wasn’t right; it was easy and got things going, but if my races are going to be as exciting as they should be, I want to sort the cars properly so that the slowest cars race the slowest and the fastest race the fastest and so on, so things are a lot closer and there’s a lot more of a chance for the underdogs to win.
So, I took all the heat 1 results from the last big tournament-which was the Banzai Runner IV” event during “Secret Oktober” in that month last year-and sorted them by race time to come up with new Groups A, B, and C based on performance! The only attention I had to pay to the racing numbers was to make sure that none of the 5 duplicate numbers (a necessary evil, as I explained here) were in the same group.
One of the things I’ve decided to drop for this year is the Sports Car “Enduro” race, which was a long-format race where each car went 10 laps instead of the usual 5. I would like to do that again, but the reality is I just don’t have the time; there’s too many other things vying my attention these days, primarily work, where I’m putting in longer hours now than I have the last couple of years; part of the price of promotions and raises! Since the big “Banzai Runner” series takes place in October and the “Sports Car Sleigh Ride” (which was not run in 1985/2023) obviously takes place around X-mas, I decided that March and April will be a similar format 5-lap simple elimination style matchup, and because of that it’s going to become part of the “Banzai Runner” series, which means there will be two such sports car events this year! So with that in mind, here are the lineups for the upcoming BANZAI RUNNER V!
Now, as all you fellow slot racers know, this isn’t truly a list of who’s slowest to fastest, because there are many variables in racing; one of these fast cars may have had a bad day when these times were captured, while one of the slower ones may have gotten lucky! But shaking all that out is part of the fun!
Of course, as the above images of my spreadsheets make clear, Group C is deficient by 10 cars; this means that, by default, all new builds will be added to Group C regardless of performance until I hit that magic number of 96 total (32 each), at which point I will re-sort everything again, but I doubt that will happen until the end of this year since there’s just not that many sports car bodies out there to buy and add to my fleets, and the ones I’m after are mostly very rare Bauer creations which are phenomenally expensive and will take a lot of time to me to acquire.
Even so, I have quite a cool collection at this point, and I can’t wait to get them back on the track for another round! The action should be starting soon, dear readers, and as you know it will all be recorded here, because the action never stops @ DRAG CITY!
Man, when it comes to managing Drag City, you have this down to a science! With this many cars and the professional races you put on, I can see how you need to stay organized like this!