Tournaments

Tournaments let your venue run competitive events on top of the driving sessions GTLane already records. You pick a format and a scoring metric, enter drivers, build rounds and heats, attach each driver’s driving session to their result, and let GTLane rank the heat for you.

Tournaments are fully manual by design: you decide who advances and when. The format you pick shapes the options you see, but GTLane never moves drivers between heats on its own — that keeps you in control for walk-ins, no-shows, and tie-break decisions on race night.

Open Tournaments in the admin sidebar (under Operations, trophy icon) to get started.

Concepts at a glance

Term	Meaning
Tournament	The event itself: name, format, scoring metric, status, dates.
Driver (entrant)	A customer entered into the tournament, with an optional seed number and group label.
Round	A stage of the event (e.g. Qualifying, Quarterfinals, Final), ordered by sequence.
Heat	A single race inside a round. Drivers are added to heats as result rows.
Result	One driver’s outcome in one heat: position, points, an advanced flag, and an optional linked driving session.
Standings	A live table aggregating every result in the tournament per driver.

A driver can only appear once per heat, but may race in any number of heats across the tournament — that’s what makes last-chance qualifiers and repechage rounds possible.

Tournament formats

The format mainly determines which round types you can pick. All five formats use the same building blocks.

Format	Available round types	Typical use
Single elimination	Knockout, Final	Classic bracket — heat winners advance, losers are out.
Double elimination	Knockout, Redemption, Final	Drivers drop to a losers bracket after a first loss and are only out after two. Rounds can be tagged Winners or Losers side.
Groups + knockout	Group, Knockout, Final	Group stage first (use driver group labels), top finishers advance to knockout heats.
Repechage / LCQ	Knockout, LCQ, Final	Knockout with last-chance-qualifier heats where eliminated drivers can fight back in.
Round robin	Group, Final	Everyone races everyone; the standings table decides the podium.

Scoring metrics

The scoring metric drives the Auto-rank button and the default ordering of the standings:

• Best lap — drivers are ordered by their fastest valid lap in the linked driving session (fastest first).
• Total time — drivers are ordered by the sum of their valid lap times (lowest first). Use this for fixed-lap-count races.
• Position points — drivers are ordered by the points you enter manually (highest first). Use this when results come from the sim’s own race finishing order or a points scheme.

For the two telemetry-based metrics, GTLane only counts valid timed laps: invalidated laps and out-laps (laps recorded with a zero time, e.g. the formation lap) are ignored. These are the same rules used for the best-lap figures shown on driving sessions, so the numbers always match.

Creating a tournament

1. Go to Tournaments and click New Tournament.
2. Enter a name (and optionally a description) — e.g. Spring Cup 2026.
3. Pick the style (format) and scoring metric. A hint under each selector explains the choice.
4. Optionally set start and end dates.
5. Save. New tournaments start in Draft status.

You can change any of these later from the detail page via Edit — including the status:

• Draft — being set up, not yet racing.
• Active — the event is running.
• Completed — finished; kept for history and standings.
• Cancelled — called off.

Status is informational and also works as a filter on the tournament list; it never blocks editing.

Adding drivers

On the tournament detail page, open the Drivers tab:

1. Search for the customer in the driver picker and click Add. Only members of your organization can be entered, and each driver can be entered once per tournament.
2. Optionally set a seed (ranking number used to order the list) and a group label (e.g. A, B).

What are seed and group for?

Both fields are planning aids — they don’t move drivers anywhere by themselves.

• Seed ranks drivers by expected strength (1 = strongest), usually from qualifying times or a previous event. Use it when you compose heats so favourites meet as late as possible — classic bracket seeding pairs high seeds against low seeds (1 vs 8, 2 vs 7, …) and keeps the top seeds in different heats. The drivers list is ordered by seed, so the pairing is easy to read off.
• Group label assigns the driver to a group for group-stage formats (Groups + knockout, Round robin). Give everyone in group A the label A, build that group’s heats from those drivers, and the Standings tab will show the label on each row so you can read per-group tables and decide who advances.

Removing a driver removes only their entry; any results already recorded for them stay intact.

Building rounds and heats

Open the Rounds & Heats tab:

1. Type a round name (e.g. Quarterfinals) and click Add Round. Rounds are numbered automatically in the order you create them.
2. On the round, optionally pick a round type (the options depend on the tournament format) and — for double elimination — a bracket side (Winners / Losers).
3. Inside the round, type a heat label (e.g. Heat 1) and click Add Heat.

Each heat has its own status (Pending → Active → Completed) you can set from the dropdown on the heat — useful on a TV screen or for keeping track during a busy evening.

Recording results

Inside a heat:

1. Pick a driver from the Pick a driver… dropdown and click Add Result. Only tournament entrants who are not already in this heat are offered.
2. For each result row you can set:
   • Pos — the finishing position (filled automatically by Auto-rank, editable any time).
   • Points — manually entered points (required for the position points metric).
   • Driving session — link the driver’s actual stint (see below).
   • Advanced — toggle on for drivers you promote to the next round. This is your bookkeeping flag; create their result row in the next round’s heat yourself.

Linking driving sessions

The driving-session dropdown lists that driver’s recent sessions with date, track, and best lap, so the session recorded by SimHub during their stint is easy to spot. Linking a session is what powers auto-ranking and the lap-time columns.

A few things to know:

• The list only ever offers sessions belonging to that driver. If the stint was recorded against the wrong customer, fix it first on the Driving Sessions page (Change driver), then link it here.
• You can clear the link by selecting No session.
• If a linked driving session is later deleted, the result and its recorded position survive — only the lap-time data disappears.

Auto-ranking a heat

Once results have sessions (or points) attached, click Auto-rank on the heat. GTLane orders the heat by the tournament’s scoring metric and writes positions 1, 2, 3, … onto the results:

• Best lap: fastest valid lap, ascending.
• Total time: sum of valid laps, ascending.
• Position points: points, descending.

Drivers with nothing to rank on (no linked session, no valid laps, or no points) always sort to the bottom. Auto-rank is just a helper — you can overwrite any position by hand afterwards, and you can re-run it whenever the data changes.

Standings

The Standings tab aggregates every recorded result in the tournament per driver:

Column	Meaning
Heats	Number of heats the driver has a result in.
Wins	Heats finished in position 1.
Points	Sum of points across all results.
Best lap	Fastest valid lap across all linked sessions.
Total time	Sum of valid lap times across all linked sessions.
Group	The driver’s group label, for reading group tables.

Drivers are ranked by the tournament’s scoring metric (with wins as the tie-breaker). The table updates live as you record results — perfect for showing between rounds.

Deleting a tournament

Delete from the tournament list (open the edit sheet → Delete tournament) or from the detail page. Deleting removes the tournament from all lists along with its rounds, heats, and results. The linked driving sessions themselves are never touched — they remain on the customers’ profiles.

All tournament changes (creation, edits, results, auto-ranks, deletions) are recorded in the Activity Log, so you can always trace who changed what during an event.

Example: a one-night knockout cup

A typical 8-driver evening with the single elimination format and best lap scoring:

1. Create the tournament: style Single elimination, metric Best lap, status Active.
2. Add the 8 drivers in the Drivers tab.
3. Create round Semifinals (type Knockout) with Heat 1 and Heat 2, 4 drivers each.
4. As each driver finishes their stint, link their driving session to their result row.
5. Click Auto-rank on each heat. Toggle Advanced on the top 2 of each heat.
6. Create round Final (type Final) with one heat, add the 4 advanced drivers, race, link sessions, Auto-rank.
7. Set the tournament to Completed and show the Standings tab on the venue screen.