Testimonials - GrandPrix Race Manager

Randy;
I have been a loyal user of your software for as long as I can remember, version 14 I think. It's part of my January to-do list to come purchase the latest version every year. I have used it for close to 100 derbys at this point and it is amazing. Always available, always works and just all around the best option out there.

GR Gordon-Ross
Lawrence, KS

I want to thank you for your support and help this year. I love your software. It's easy to learn and use. The videos are wonderful too. I watch a section and then apply what I learned. This year I got some of our church youths to help me too. Your work is well done indeed!

God Bless!

Jody L Meyer
Ottawa Center Chapel
Coopersville, MI

Hi Randy,

Just a quick update to let you know that our Cub Scout pinewood derby was a success!

Even though we had to manually input times [timer doesn't have a computer interface], and I was apprehensive about using a new piece of software, the derby ran perfectly.

Last year we tracked everything in a spreadsheet that no one really knew much about, and we didn't finish until about 3pm.

This year, everything ran great and we were done by noon, even though we had to enter results by hand.

Thanks for making such a great program and for you and your wife's willingness to help me out!

Regards,

Justin Otis
Pack 195
Colorado Springs, CO

Thanks,

I just ran our race over the weekend, this really saved me a lot of stress over running a race on my own and gave me options for how to run the race. Also all your video tutorials were very helpful.

Mario Tooch
Pack 940
Denton, TX

In the final preparations for our derby I could not get our software to work. It was another company and there was no support available for it. In a last ditch effort to save our derby the next morning I reached out to GrandPrix Software Central and received an email response back within minutes. At the late hour on a Friday evening I was able to purchase GrandPrix Race Management software cd/download and downloaded it within minutes! We raced the next morning and had a wonderful derby! The software was excellent and worked wonderfully! I could not have been happier considering it was almost 10 pm on Friday when I reached out and Randy was available to help me! They have YouTube videos to walk you through the software and help you set up and run it. If that wasn't enough of an impression I then received my cd download today already! I just held our event this last Saturday (it's Monday) and wasn't expecting the cd for several more days! Wonderful service! Thank you Randy!

Kristal Helton
Pack 148
Cimarron, KS

Hello Randy,

I wanted to thank you for your quick response on Thursday regarding the Race Manager software.

We had our race on Saturday and it was a huge success! This is the 2nd year we have used the software and after observing an AWANA Grand Prix who recorded everything by hand I knew there had to be something better out there. So grateful I found you online.

Thank you for your patience with me when I called so often last week. :-)

God Bless, (and until next year) ;-)

~Alisha
Easthaven Baptist Church
Kalispell, MT

Well I was that guy.... 24 hours to race day and I was not satisfied with what our pack had put together for the years most important event. Given free reign of the competition I assessed what we had. It was an older Derby Magic track and timer.

So I gave GrandPrix a call, and promptly put an order in. Next ran to the office supply store picked up a serial to USB cable some Avery 5804 stickers and some card-stock. The custom interface allowed me to begin communicating with the timer and with a few test commands sent had the track responding to my reset commands. I spent Sat night entering the pack into the registration and printed the car numbers and inspection sheets off. The next morning registration went off without a hitch!! Now nervous about my short order testing, I ran the scheduler and set up the auto heat and auto reset features. Fingers crossed we let the first heat go......

WOW the day was a complete success, we had the race screen projected and the spectators were all happy and having a good time. Used the card stock and printed off certificates on the spot, and today I am running all of the stats to distribute to the racers and crewchiefs. In addition I love that I can review stats as the race official and see how efficiently the day went, and happily we kept the race turnaround times to 90 seconds. There was no loss of action and kept even the tigers attention all day!! In the end I donated about $100 in upgrades to our track but was paid back with a room full of million dollar smiles... THANK YOU!!

Greg Melitski
Pack 141
Belvidere, NJ

Last night our church held our AWANA derby. Using GrandPrix Race Manager is like a dream! I've run the race event computer for this event for several years. We've used Derby Master in the past and suffered numerous problems in nearly every event; software crashes, loss of the database, difficulty dealing with heat re-runs, etc. One year after running half the heats the software crashed and took the database with it. I had to recreate the competitor database from scratch while everyone waited and then start the race from the beginning. Talk about stress!

After every past event I told myself that we needed to get a better solution, but I never got around to it. This year, two days before the event, I bought GrandPrix Race [Manager] and thought we'd give it a shot. It is a joy to use. Everyone involved in the event is very pleased with the results. Instead of dreading it I'm actually looking forward to next years event.

Well done!

Regards,

Michael Herrmann
First Evangelical Free Church
Sioux Falls, SD

Randy,

Great idea! Thanks!

On a side note...

I want to thank you for this software. The last couple of years doing the pinewood derby were typically problematic and took several hours to run. Midway through the events we started losing the kids attention and to a certain extent our minds. There was a great deal of frustration among the parents. It's hard when you have little siblings and we are asking them to sit for 3 to 4 hours. It just doesn't work. Last year they asked me to help. They had purchased this application previously but hadn't figured out how to make it work with the track. They had a number of technical issues with the track and the timer they purchased. I was a bit nervous about taking this on and having things not working. Just in case I had a backup laptop and had another parent manually record the times in excel. I had it setup to calculate the results in case we needed to keep going. I even setup a portion of the track with the timer to test it in advance. That's how nervous I was.

It really did not take long to learn the software and get things setup correctly. It turned out to be one of the smoothest events we've ever had! We had the racing schedule printed in advance so the parent volunteers could efficiently load the track and keep things moving. Kids and parents absolutely loved the results screen and cheered with anticipation at both the start and finish. I had taken pictures of the kids when we registered the cars and was able to display them on the projector. There are so many other features that helped. I'm sure I'm leaving out other examples. It was incredible. I can't thank you enough for that!

This year I'm thinking about adding the sound and replay.

Thanks again,

Jason Alexander
Pack 4019
Bellingham, WA

WOW! What a difference GP Race Manager made for our Pinewood Derby. It enabled us to run more heats in less time and to base our scoring on time versus points which everyone found to be a more fair way to choose winners. The Scouts liked seeing their name, their car name and their race times projected on the video display and the boys got a big kick out of hearing the sound effects included with the software. A last minute entrant was easily integrated into the race schedule, something I would have had more difficulty doing using my old Excel spreadsheet method. Most importantly, the Tutorial and the Help functions are thorough and easy to understand.

Bob Paschke
Pack 125
Norfolk, MA