You may have noticed that we like technology at Daytona. We aim to be at the cutting edge of motor-sport technology… well at least when it comes to karting. We don’t quite have the budgets that the F1 teams have with regard to using technology to go faster, but we do make very good use of I.T. and tech throughout our business.
You won’t be surprised to learn that we use laser-wheel-alignment systems to ensure that the karts are set up correctly, nor will you be suprised that each kart has a radio transponder fitted that tells the Clubspeed timing system when it crosses the line – although you may not know that the tranponders have no batteries and require no charging (as the timing loop under the circuit energises a capacitor in the transponder as it crosses the line and then the transponder beams its identity to the loop about 150 times in the following tenth of a second before going flat again).
Similarly, its no big stretch of the imagination to work out that our booking system is linked to our timing system. The Clubspeed Server at each venue hosts pretty much everything we need to know – your details, how fast you can lap the circuit, how many cappucinos you like to buy whilst with us etc. We use the system to analyse what our customers want and to communicate specially adapted offers to them. We also use the system to keep a close check on our karts. We monitor every karts laptimes to ensure that they are all as closely matched as possible. So far in 2011, the fleets at our three Daytona venues have completed 2,480,953 laps. Every laptime is recorded and monitored and although different drivers will obviously manage different laptimes (and wet laps are a lot slower than dry laps), the system can highlight any kart that is not within our tolerance – ensuring that our engineering team can keep the fleet as evenly matched as possible.
Over the coming month the Clubspeed System will also send those laptimes to your kart – the multi-information displays we are fitting to all of our karts show your race position, laptime, gap to the driver in front, elapsed time and messages from race control – all in realtime.
But the reason for this blog post – and for the title above (do you recognise the quote?) is the email I received from our web hosting company this morning. They have had to increase the bandwidth for the Daytona website once again as we are now seeing 125 Gygabytes of traffic on the site per month. Daytona.co.uk is apparently seeing 5 times as much traffic as the average site on their servers.
Well done us!
Jim Graham
Team Daytona