About Race Manager

Race Manager started way back in 2005 as a result of helping with registration and results at our club's Mud, Sweat, & Gears Cyclo-cross Series. Typically eight races spread out over two to three months, it quickly became quite tedious and annoying to re-enter over half of the same riders one weekend after another into a spreadsheet. As other people helped out it also became apparent that no amount of macros, code, or automation in a spreadsheet was going to prohibit the novice user from easily accidentally messing up the registrations and/or results.

Once our promoter informed me that most of that rider data I was re-entering for each race was in a file from USA Cycling, the answer was obvious. Since I actually develop software for a living, I needed to write some software.

By the time our large Tri-Cities Road Club Omnium came around at the first of June in 2006, Race Manager was robust enough to handle an Omnium by simply clicking to print the Omnium Results with the Race Results immediately after entering the results. And, most importantly, it was simple enough for anyone to use while protecting them (and the data) from the devastating mistakes that can so easily be made in a spreadsheet.

The Guts

Although the user interface uses the familiarity and ease of use of Microsoft Access®, it runs in the Access runtime environment with custom menus, without the database window or any user access to the database objects. The data is actually stored in a fast and robust transactional database server, Microsoft SQL Server®.

Don't worry though, the runtime versions of Access and SQL Server that come with Race Manager do not cost anything extra. The custom Setup program asks your permission before downloading and installing these prerequisites and does everything for you to setup Race Manager and its prerequisites. Upgrades are just as simple and extremely quick. Download the small Upgrade exe file, run it, and in less than a minute you are up to date with the latest version.

Race Manager runs on Windows 7® 32-bit and 64-bit (even though Windows 7 is no longer supported by Microsoft), and Windows 8.x, and Windows 10.