Organising a track day
A practical, step-by-step guide to running a track day — from listing the event and selling tickets to waivers, check-in, live timing and payouts.
Ask anyone who runs a track day what the hard part is, and almost nobody says the driving. It’s the spreadsheet of entries that’s out of date by Thursday. It’s the WhatsApp group where three people have paid by revolut and one has paid twice. It’s the printed waivers in a plastic folder, the run-group list scribbled on the back of a sign-on sheet, and the sinking realisation at 08:30 that nobody knows who’s actually turning up.
Outlap exists because that admin is the same for every organiser, everywhere, and it doesn’t need to be rebuilt from scratch each time. This is the full run-through: from the moment you pick a date to the moment the money lands and the results are out.
Step 1: Create the event
Everything starts in Create event. You pick a date, then a venue — either from our database of 320+ circuits (with layouts, corner data and FIA grades already attached) or a custom venue if you’re running somewhere that isn’t a permanent circuit.
From there you set the shape of the day: session structure, total capacity, and your run groups. Groups matter more than people expect — getting novice, intermediate and experienced drivers into sensible bands at listing time is what stops the 09:00 sign-on queue from turning into a negotiation.
A useful detail: new events save as drafts, and drafts are free. Nothing is publicly visible, nothing is charged, and nothing is committed until you choose to publish. Build the listing over a week if you want, share the draft internally, change your mind about capacity twice. That’s fine.
Step 2: Understand what it costs you
Outlap has two separate charges, and it’s worth being clear about which is which because organisers routinely assume that this stuff costs more than it’s worth, or detracts from revenue into running the event itself.
The listing fee is a one-off, flat charge to publish an event:
| Event type | Fee |
|---|---|
| Meet, drive/touge, driving route, car show | €10 |
| Track day, drift, time attack, rally | €25 |
Your club’s first event is free. So the genuine of trying Outlap on a real event is zero.
The ticketing fee is separate: if you sell tickets through Outlap, there’s a 5% fee via Stripe, which allows you to onboard and run yourself as a ticketing business on Outlap. This gives you a place to send money, manage it, etc. That’s it. No monthly platform cost, no per-driver licence, no setup fee. If you sell your tickets somewhere else entirely, you can just link out to an external ticket URL and pay only the listing fee.
Step 3: Tickets and waivers
You can build out as many ticket types as the day needs: full day, half day, passenger, garage hire, instructor slot, spectator. Each type gets its own capacity, so you can cap garages at eight without capping the event at eight.
Waivers are the part most organisers are quietly nervous about, and Outlap handles them for you. Your liability disclaimer is signed digitally at registration and stored as an immutable snapshot. The exact wording that driver agreed to, on the date they agreed to it. If you later change the disclaimer, affected drivers are asked to re-sign. No plastic folder, no arguments about which version was on the desk that morning.
Step 4: Fill the entry list
Publishing puts your event on the public Outlap events directory and on your club’s page. From there you have a few ways to push it:
- Embeddable widgets: drop your event list or a registration form straight into your own website with a snippet of JavaScript. Entries still flow into your Outlap dashboard.
- Broadcast email: message confirmed attendees directly from the event. Schedule changes, weather warnings, gate codes, “bring your own fuel”. Sent, logged, done.
- Event chat: a group thread for the event where drivers can sort lifts, tyres and paddock space between themselves. You control who can join, and you can lock it to approved attendees only if you’d rather it stayed tidy.
Every entry that comes in lands on one live manifest, which is the thing you’ll actually look at all week.
Step 5: The Paddock, on the day
The Paddock is the organiser’s cockpit for the event itself. It’s built for a phone in a cold pit lane, not a desk.
From the Paddock you can:
- Check drivers in by QR: scan the ticket on any phone. No scanners to hire, no hardware, no laminated lists.
- See the live entry list: who’s here, who hasn’t shown, who’s in which group, what they’re driving.
- Move people between groups on the fly, because someone always turns out to be quicker or slower than they told you.
- Export the manifest as CSV for the timing team, noise testing, or insurance.
- Grant Race Control access to specific people. Club admins and organisers get it automatically; you can add a named member for one event only, which is exactly what you want for the mate who’s running timing for you on Saturday and no longer needs the keys on Sunday.
- Generate a briefing using AI to advise and guide drivers before they hit the track, including giving guidance on tyre and fuel!
Step 6: Timing, and the board
Timing is where a track day starts feeling like an event rather than a hire of tarmac.
Outlap supports three sector splits per lap, entered manually in Race Control, imported from your existing timing system, or pushed in from your own transponder hardware via our timing API. Whatever your source, the output is the same broadcast-style board.
The board is designed to go on a screen in the paddock: TV fullscreen mode for rotated displays, purple for fastest-in-session, green for personal best, and a spectator view you can share with people who aren’t at the circuit. Drivers can search for their own name or pin a watchlist of the cars they’re racing.
Two Race Control features are worth calling out because they save arguments:
- Incident and penalty notes: log an incident against a lap with a category, so “he was told about track limits” is a record rather than a memory.
- Manual lap adjustments with an audit trail: if you need to correct a time, you can, and every change is stamped with who made it and when.
Step 7: After the chequered flag
The day isn’t finished when the last car comes in.
- Export results as CSV or a PDF timing report, ready to send out or post.
- Read the event report: attendance, no-shows, revenue, fees, net payout.
- Handle money problems properly: issue refunds from the payments panel, and manage chargebacks and disputes with evidence submission rather than an email chain with Stripe.
- Collect feedback automatically: an email goes out after the event asking drivers for lap times and how it went.
- Feed the leaderboard: if you run a series, results roll into F1/GT-style championship standings across the season.
The organiser’s checklist
| When | Do |
|---|---|
| 4–6 weeks out | Create the draft, set capacity and run groups, write the waiver |
| 3–4 weeks out | Publish, set ticket types, share to your club page and site |
| 1 week out | Broadcast the schedule and gate details, review the entry list |
| Day before | Export the manifest, confirm Race Control access for your team |
| On the day | QR check-in, run groups, live timing on the paddock screen |
| Within a week | Export results, check the payout, send the feedback request |
Start with the free one
The best way to evaluate any of this is to run an event on it. Your club’s first listing is free, drafts cost nothing, and you can have a track day fully configured. Including venue, groups, tickets, waivers & everything else in about ten minutes. And if you need help, just drop me a note.