Status Updates at the 500 and car tracking

[BarrelRoll]

It's been a long time since I've spent a race watching the dots for a race and listened to weatherman over the internet. It seem like all they were doing all night was status updates to the point is was getting in the way of more important race traffic.

Don't most teams have someone sitting in front of a computer sending updates to their chase crews?

I watched the dots for a golf cart team. They had spot trackers on the race car and 2 chase trucks and then every 15 minutes texted them an update via cell. A couple hours into the race I couldn't get score tracking to work for the life of me and the spot trackers saved them. It was a little hard to give exact mileages but having spot on sat view and the course overlaid on google earth I was able to get within a mile or so. I think from now on we are going to go with spot on the race car as well as the required tracking. For the 1000 we are going to kick it up a notch and have our stateside logistics person have a sat messenger or push to talk sat phone so they can have better communication with chase crews. Cell service was pretty good for the 500 but I know it won't be the same for the 1000.

Was I the only one who was getting frustrated with the amount of status requests? If you can afford to race the 500 you should be able to afford a couple spot trackers and have someone help relay car information besides the weatherman.

 

[RacingTraX]

@BarrelRoll Not sure if you knew this but we offer affordable direct race-to-chase tracking services. You put one of our trackers on your race vehicle and one on each of your chase vehicles, we've then programmed the race vehicle to automatically send a message every 8 minutes through the iridium sat network with your race cars Race Mile and Speed to all of your chase vehicles. No middle man needed and the team can message back and forth to each other. It's very affordable and works great. I raced the Baja 500 in Pro UTV, there were a few scenarios that played out where tracking and communication was the difference between winning and loosing.

 

[RacingTraX]

Oh and BTW we compaired our tracking with the SCORE tracking... lets just say the SCORE tracking was less than accurate... we though it was pretty comical that they were tracking us out in the West African Ocean.

 

[ehall]

Maybe give the delorme inreach a try. You can ping it anywhere with cell phone service to get an exact location.

 

[ssbfour]

If you are racing and tracking is important for your team, you need to get racingtrax or leadnav. It's a small price to pay after all the thousands we pay to race in SCORE.


Sent from my iPhone using Tapatalk

 

[C4]

Oh and BTW we compaired our tracking with the SCORE tracking... lets just say the SCORE tracking was less than accurate... we though it was pretty comical that they were tracking us out in the West African Ocean.View attachment 181974

I was helping the 1985 team and was asked towards the end of the race to update them on your location. I couldn't figure out a way to tell them that you were off the coast of Africa without them thinking I was just being a smart ass.

 

[RacingTraX]

That's hilarious! Adrian gave us a pretty good run there!