Determine a winner for a racing game?

How would you go about it? Would you use an if/Else statement? Need help with this. thanks in advance

to do that i would imagine making a dummy object and setting a max number of laps, maybe make a dummy object at the start and when a car goes by it increment their lap variable by one and make and put an if in a loop statement maybe a while that runs infinitely with an if inside it to say if laps reaches so many then set opacity of some letters to 1(100%) and then to prevent another racer from starting that, make it set the while condition to false for all the cars

[Scott300]

I would make a number of objects around the track, check to see if a player passes it, make sure they passed them all and didnt just go backwards save it in a variable each time they pass one, than when they get past them all and back to the first, reset all the variables back to false and put lap +1, than check each time to see if they have achieved the number of laps to win.