How We Monitor Races

We have our own custom software that we’ve created to analyze the timing and scoring data stream. We’ll use it to continually compare the teams’ and drivers’ racing lap times to their qualifying times.

Will this stop sandbagging/cheating?

It should.

Will we automatically penalize a driver or team that runs faster during the race than they did during qualifying?

No. We won’t assume such a change is suspicious upfront; we’ll take a logical and fair approach.

So what will we do?

If a driver or team starts to run faster than their qualifying time, we’ll first check and consider trends in data to determine:

Is the track getting faster? (We’ll compare them to how other teams are running.)

Is that team or driver learning the track better?

How do this drivers lap times compare to his team mates lap times (our barcoding system will let us do that easily).  Is he or she just catching up to his faster team mates lap times?

If we feel that a team has genuinely gotten faster, we might move the team up a class or penalize them laps. And if we make this kind of decision, we’ll show you why we did it.

Which brings us to:

Who gets awards?

Everyone will be racing to the same checkered flag, but we’ll hand out awards for 1st, 2nd, and 3rd place within each class.