Recently, I ran the 1936 National Air Races for our Gorilla Ace! pulp campaign.  HEX has some fairly crunchy rules for chase sequences in Secrets of the Surface World, pg. 145 (sidebar), which is essentially what a race is.  The problem I found with the SOSW rules are that they cut into the flow of a cinematic/comic book action sequence — you have to take the base combat speed, add the base speed in feet of the vehicle times the number of successes.  It’s not complex, but it requires a sudden jump into math, and that can throw the players out of the moment.

I decided to run the races differently.  One of the races was the Thompson Cup — a 10 mile course through pylons at different altitudes (but usually quite low to the ground) with 10 laps total…I had the characters roll for each lap — their PILOT sill plus the Handling of the aircraft.  They were competing against some of the best pilots in the world, so I used the average assuming the pilots they were racing had a Dexterity 4, Pilot 4, and a +2 Handling:  they had to beat a 5 per lap to lead the race.

Any successes were added to their next lap test — so if one pilot got a +2 success (a 7), they added that +2 dice to their next test.  If they missed the test by two, then had a -2 dice to their test.  There was also a lower success point that, if missed, meant they lost control of the vehicle (a PILOT 2 in this case and totally arbitrary…)  Another thing I added was a reliability test for the vehicles at the beginning — race planes are testy beasts and the characters’ mechanic had to run a test at the beginning of the race.  A failure would mean some kind of mechanic issue that would put the character out of the race.

This systems moved fast and kept the excitement of a fast moving race.

For the Bendix Cup — a transcontinental race — the length of the contest was such that running all 15 hours or so would also not work.  For an endurance/ navigation based race, I set up legs for the trip — in this case, New York to Cincinati, Cincinati to St. Louis, St. Louis to Midland Texas, Texas to Los Angeles.  Each leg requires a MECHANICS test v. 2 — a failure results in an incident where the pilot would have to put the plane down safely and would be out of the race; the other test was a navigation test that the pilot (and if they had a navigator a joint test) vs. 2 during the day, 3 at night.

Modifiers for the distance test are different:  Handling isn’t an issue, speed is.  So in this case, I took the average speed of a racing plane (about 250mph) and gave a +1 die bonus for each 25 mph over the average, -1 die for each 25mph under the average.  The number of successes adds to the next leg’s test and the success is cumulative.  During a leg where they had to stop for fuel (usually about ever 900 miles) they would lose -2 die due to the time on the ground.

I think these guidelines can work to aid in a fast paced chase sequence, as well.  The chased car escapes once the die benefits are either higher that the pursuit car’s driver skill rating (for instance, a mook chasing you with a faster car [assume a +1 die bonus], a +2 handling, and skill rating of 6 for a total of 9 [average 4+] is lost when the die benefit from your successes is higher than 4+).  Another option would be to give the bonus from successes to a DRIVE test to do some maneuver that would hide the vehicle from the pursuer — park behind a building, make an unexpected turn into an alley, take it off-road and park behind a convenient copse of trees — with a contested DRIVE (pursued) vs. PERCEPTION (pursuer) test.  If they don’t see you, you lost them.