In an era when there’s a tablet or smart phone application for almost everything, how about one that facilitates communication between driver and crew chief?
Toyota Racing Development and Microsoft have partnered to produce a Windows 8 touch-enabled app that does precisely that. In essence, it’s a more compact mobile computing platform that monitors real-time performance data.
NASCAR doesn’t allow data acquisition during the races themselves, but in practice and testing, a crew member can hand a tablet to a driver as soon as the car pulls into the pits or the garage. The driver can see his or her own performance data and compare it with that of other drivers.
The driver can then give feedback by pointing to a position on a track map on the screen, say Turn 1, and rating the handling characteristics of the car on a scale of minus 5 to plus 5. So the driver can tell the crew chief via tablet — without letting other teams in on the radio chatter — how the car is behaving at every critical point on the track.
The application streamlines the process of providing feedback. Eventually, there will be a wireless capability that will enable a crew chief on top of a transporter to see the driver’s feedback as he inputs it.
Rather than try to tailor the application to specific drivers, it’s up to individual driver/crew chief combinations to interpret, for instance, just what “negative 3 loose on corner exit” means.
“(The crew chief) kinds of tunes himself to know that when it’s a negative 3 or 3 loose, he knows how to respond to that,” said Darren Jones, group lead for software development at TRD. “So that’s something between the chemistry of the driver and crew chief that they really start to hone in on.”
Sharing data between teams also is a key to the success of the project.
“A big part of the Toyota program, especially in the (Camping World) Truck and Nationwide Series, is the amount of collaboration between the teams,” said Steve Wickham, TRD’s vice president of chassis operations. “In an ideal world, yes, we’d all have the same metric, and the drivers would all speak exactly the same language.
“This is one step toward that ultimate goal. At least they’ve got a number now, rather than a variation of text or numbers or finger gestures as to how the car’s handling.”
TRD is testing the application at the Nationwide and Truck Series levels before introducing it to the NASCAR Sprint Cup Series.
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