Interval-start timing for spectators: head races, time trials, rally stages

Interval-start events — rowing head races, cycling and ski time trials, rally stages — have a peculiar cruelty for spectators: the competitor crossing the line first is almost never the one winning. Whoever holds a stopwatch that tracks every competitor's own elapsed time is the only person on the bank who knows the real standings. One iPhone can be that stopwatch.

The interval-start blind spot

In an interval-start race everyone races the clock, not each other: boats go off ten or twenty seconds apart, rally cars a minute apart. Positions on the course mean nothing without each competitor's own start time — and keeping four or eight personal clocks in your head, or on a wet program with a pencil, is exactly the multi-stopwatch problem in spectator clothing. A stack of *n* stopwatch apps fails here for the usual reason: by the time you've found the right small button, the boat is past you.

Starting competitors as they go off

In Herotime, you list the competitors you care about in start order — your club's boats, your friend's car. Then the start sequence is one gesture per start: each short tap starts the next competitor the moment they go off. Ten-second intervals, irregular gaps, a scratched entry you skip past — the order does the bookkeeping. (A mass-start wave mixed in? A rapid tap sequence starts them as one group.)

Reading the race at a checkpoint

Standing at the halfway mark, each tap as a competitor passes records their split, assigned automatically in rotation — competitors pass in start order far more often than not, and when someone has genuinely overtaken on the course, one drag moves the time to the right name. Now your screen shows what the crowd can't see: everyone's own elapsed time at the same landmark, directly comparable. The iPhone's physical volume button works as the timing button (a patented part of the method), so your eyes stay on the water or the road.

The finish: who actually won?

Same gesture at the line: tap per finisher, and every competitor's full series — start, checkpoints, finish — sits in the timing history. The answer to "who actually won?" is on your screen while the announcer is still doing arithmetic. Afterwards it exports as CSV through the iOS Share Sheet, which club group chats have been known to appreciate. Everything runs offline; riverbanks and mountain stages usually make sure of that.

Born at a regatta

This scenario is in Herotime's DNA: before the current app, we shipped RallyTime Pro, an interval-start stopwatch built for exactly this spectator problem. Its job — many competitors, one watch, each on their own clock — became one of the founding use cases of the patented single-button method (U.S. Patent 11,080,947 B2) that Herotime is built on. Coaches got the headline; spectators got the origin story.