Hosting an in-person race for kids

If the amount of cars is not an issue, cost to add more to the bag of cars; and the time devoted to racing permits it, possibly let the losers go one more round?  I say this from a possible situation where All 20 kids pick out a random car.  Bobby and 9 other kids all advance and get to get a new car for their next race.  A few kids will end up 2 cars, 3 cars, etc...  And it was all at the luck of the draw into the bag to get a car that was unknown to them.

Now if little Jimmy Snotnose is having a bad day, he might say it is unfair because they all had better cars than me.  I got the 1997 Super Slow Goose and they all got fancy muscle cars.  And he cries off with his one and only car for the day.

Maybe a second chance for the losers to kind of show they get at least two cars for the event.  And it allows them to possible move up with the other 10 winners from the first go around.

This all depends on your time available to run this many heats, and your bag of cars is plenty enough for the extra rounds needed to give the losers a second shot.  And from these heats, you will have another 5 winners to make the 2nd main heat a 15  field.  You don't' go from 20 to 10, you would go from 20 to 15 to find out the first main event race or whatever you call them.

Just a thought.  A child can't be too mad if he/she gets 2 cars and they were the ones who pulled them out.  All kids get the same chance, but a bit easier to swallow if you only got 1 car and it was called a 2025 Green Slug shaped like a slug and went about as fast as one. :-)

Those are some very good points. I've always believed that kids should learn to lose and win gracefully, but that doesn't always happen in reality I guess. 
I have more cars to give away than time so maybe we'll set up a table with a bunch of cars still in the package. The loser (or maybe we'll label them as a runner-up) gets to go over to the "Runner Up" table and choose another car to keep. They get to see the car and make a choice  so the early losers kinda win because they get more to choose from. 

Get in touch with DRIFT_or_DIEcast_Racing, he did the same kind of event at his kid's b-day. Can't seem to find his post specifically about him asking the same questions you have

You can keep them engauged by allowing them to place thier own cars in the starting gate and retrieving them from the stop box. Lay down the basic ground rules for the race(like NOT stepping over the track) and show them how to take the time to center the cars in the gate and where you want the cars returned to. If all goes smoothly, you should be able sit down and record stats and call out pending race participants for each race. 

Chris - Drift is a friend and I'm somewhat familiar with his events. He participates in my local FB group and I think he may have made a post about his boys race event. I'll have to try to find it. Thanks 

GSpeedR - Another good idea. The track I'm using for this is my mobile road course setup. I'd probably have to have a small step stool for the kids to reach the start gate and load cars. 

Racegrooves / Mark Kasimoff (right name?) used to do birthday parties.  He might give insight to how it went for him.   Though he did it as a business, I think.   Haven't seen him post here for a while. 

if you had some playsets and set up a kids pits play area,

it will take the "tiny hands" pressure off the real track

tracks and blocks of wood would let them get familiar with how cars work

cheap tiny stickers so they can decorate their cars would prob work, too

encourage testing for fastest, etc

when my kids were young, I did at least 1 class party for 7 years and all the field trips.

it was so much fun, glad I was young man in 30's then,
I'd probably have a heart attack trying to chase them all around now...lol

also a party store has lots of cheap extra prizes, and maybe an idea or two

Good Luck!

dr

First rule: Nobody loses, that's kid life these days :)

And I'd say to expect things to disappear (or get beat up) that aren't nailed down. If you're not okay with it being broken, don't put it out there.

I'm not sure I'd focus too much on head-to-head or anything like that. They'll just want to see cars go fast down the hill. But if you're going to do any sort of "competition" - I'd suggest doing just time-based regardless who they're up against. I wouldn't worry about bracket-izing it or anything...just grab a car, wait in line, make it go, you get a time. Less organization you thrust upon them the better/happier things will run.

Not sure it would work...but if I were doing it, I'd maybe have a stack of index cards and they can put their name on it and decorate it - it's their driver's license! And then when they run a car, the Official Adult writes the time on the other side of their card. It's their track pass and race history. They get to keep their car and get a carded one to take home.

If there needs to be a "winner" of the day (or a Top 10 podium!) then you can collect their cards, check the times and award accordingly.

Just keeping them focused and in line will be the real chore, lol - but honestly, I wouldn't put too much effort into organized racing. They'll have a blast just dropping cars. The adult just needs to be there to maintain some order and insure there's no line ditching :)

All the comments/ideas/tips are much appreciated and very helpful.  Thank you.  

Although over the years I've organized & hosted many in-person races with anywhere from 3 to literally hundreds of entrants, from my garage to multi-day diecast conventions, this one has me scratching my head more than any of them. 

Kids ages 5 to 12 like to stay active and have short attention spans. Therefore, you will probably be WAY more interested/invested in the race than they will be. Keep it short and sweet with prizes, food, and giveaways during the race. If the tournament is going to take longer than 20mins then I would have other things for the kids to do so they don't have to just sit there and watch cars roll down the track. (Remember that you and your child are probably more into this than the average person attending. Especially you since you're one of us crazies on this site LOL ????)

Yes and ask the guy that that Chris Hood mentioned. He looked like he had a good setup for his kids birthday ???? 

So here’s how it went down -

Based on the tips here we first picked up a couple cheap Dollar store Hotwheels stunt tracks to let the kids play with as they wanted and that worked like a charm!

For the racing we went with a sorta semi-organized format. The kids all got in a line, little ones first, and pulled a random car from a big pile of cars that had been opened and repacked in small cloth bags. All of these cars were new castings that typically do well on this track. They opened the bag and we placed the car on an index card with their name on it - this was their race entry for the first round of racing. The index card idea was a life saver for helping to keep track of what car belonged to which young’n

The racers were randomly paired and their cars raced side by side. The first racer to win 2 races moved on and the other got to go over to a table full of new, unopened cars and choose their favorite car as a consolation prize. The nice thing about that was the early they were eliminated the better choice they had at the consolation table. The winners moved on to the next round and picked another bagged car to race. Each round the winners raced a fresh car so you never knew who would get a fast one. Since it was basically a single elimination tournament format if we needed another racer to fill a spot we just had the already eliminated racers guess a 1-10 number with the correct guesser getting back in the game with a new racer. This went on for several rounds with the final winner getting an extra 8 pack of cars. The kids got to keep all of their raced and consolation cars so they all received multiple cars. After the main race it was basically an open track and the kids could race whatever they wanted against whoever they wanted. That went on for an hour or so until it was candles & cake time.

Overall things went really well. We had a couple parents assist with keeping order and that was really helpful. The older kids actually helped with the younger ones as well.

As I mentioned in an earlier post all of the input from this group is appreciated. As an extra benefit it sounds like we also may have pulled a couple adults into the hobby too.

On to the next one