Two customers, one Saturday night, two separate bills
Short tracks, drag strips, karting circuits and track-day organisers sell gate admission to spectators and entries, pit passes and paddock space to competitors. Nearly every tool involved is priced per head, and none of them know about each other.
What a track or a club is paying for
Write your list out by season rather than by month. Motorsport is a calendar business and the total only makes sense across a whole one.
Priced per head, on a calendar the weather controls
Per-ticket pricing charges you most on the nights you worked hardest for. A fireworks night, a touring series visit or a big-name shootout fills the banking, and the fee scales with the crowd although the platform did nothing it does not do on a quiet points night. The same fee lands on a child's ticket as on an adult one, which bites on a track trying to keep families coming back.
The competitor side multiplies differently. A fee per entry, per event, across a full season of race nights is a figure nobody has ever seen, because nobody adds the season up, and it grows with every extra class you run and every crew pass counted as a registration. Track-day and HPDE organisers feel it through run groups: the same driver returns all year and is billed as a stranger each time.
The deeper cost is that the two sides never meet. The spectator who bought a ticket in May is the person who took out a novice licence in July, and nothing in the stack knows it. Memberships sit in a third system, the championship points live in a spreadsheet on one person's laptop, and the paddock map is a printout with pencil marks on it.
What we rebuild for a track
- Gate admission on your own siteAdvance and gate pricing, season passes, family and child rules, group blocks, and a rain-check credit issued by the system rather than argued about at the window.
- Competitor entry with tech and licence checksEntry by class and run group with capacity limits, car number reservation, transponder and licence numbers on file, licence or logbook expiry flagged before an entry is accepted, and tech inspection status on the same record.
- Paddock, garage and trailer space as inventorySpace sold with the entry instead of allocated by phone, with transponder hire, extra crew passes and power hook-ups as add-ons in the same order.
- A rain date that is not a fortnight of refundsPostpone a night once and every spectator ticket and competitor entry moves with it, or becomes a credit or a refund, following the policy you posted at the start of the season.
- Memberships, renewals and the season standingsAnnual memberships and club licences with their renewal dates, and a points table published from the results your scoring system produces rather than typed in again on Sunday morning.
What stays exactly as it is
- Race control, timing and scoringDecoders, loops, the scoring software and the officials running it are the sport's record of what happened on track. We feed them the grid and take their output; we do not replace them.
- Sanctioning body licences and rulebooksWhere your sanction issues the licences, sets the rulebook or requires results filed in its own system, that contract wins and we build around it.
- Card processingWhoever sells the ticket, the processor's rate is the same. We connect to the one you already have.
The refund policy has to survive a cancelled night
Every track has the same worst week. Money has been taken from spectators and competitors for a night that is now under water, the phone starts before the weather does, and the answer has to be identical for everybody or it turns into an argument in public. Most tracks already have a sound policy printed on the entry form. What they lack is a system that can execute it in one pass: everyone affected identified, each offered the credit, transfer or refund the policy allows, and a record of what each person chose.
Being able to do that quickly is also what makes the policy affordable. A blanket refund is expensive. A credit against the rain date keeps both the money and the crowd, but only if issuing them in bulk is one action rather than a fortnight of phone calls. This is worth settling before you need it, because a washed-out night is not an exception in motorsport, it is an ordinary part of a season and it belongs in the system from the first race.
Questions tracks and clubs ask
Can spectators and competitors be handled in one system?
That is most of the point. Both sides are buying a place at the same night, and in one system the front gate and the pit gate see the same event, the same capacity and the same person. The fan who takes out a novice licence later is one record, which is also how you find next season's competitors.
Does this touch our timing and scoring?
No. Race control, transponder decoding and scoring stay with the system and the officials you use now. What we build sits either side of them: entries, classes and grids going in, and results coming back out to publish the championship standings.
What happens to money already taken when a night is rained off?
Your posted policy decides that, not us. What changes is execution: one action finds everyone who bought a ticket or entered, issues the credit, transfer or refund the policy allows, and keeps a record of which each person took, so the following week is not spent on the phone.
We run a handful of events a year. Is this overkill?
It may well be. A club with a short calendar and a modest gate is usually better off renting, and we will say so plainly. Work it out over a whole season and include competitor entries, crew passes and the membership tool, using the calculator on this site. If the season total is small, stay put.
From the blog, for motorsports and race tracks
- What does a rain date do to refunds, and what must a refund policy handle?September 27, 2026 · A postponed race night turns one night's takings into several obligations at once. The decisions a track refund policy has to make, and why bulk execution is the whole thing.
- Why does a race track pay for two separate ticketing systems?September 26, 2026 · Spectators and competitors are different customers bought for by different products, on the same Saturday night. What the split costs, and what one system would have to do.
Keep reading
Send us a season, not a month
Gate fees per ticket, entry fees per competitor, the membership tool, and the parts your race office still runs on paper.
Hiro costs about a tenth of what you pay now, quoted against your own bill. Hosting, fixes and changes included, and no per-seat fees.