By Des Toups
Five months is a long time between dry pavement opportunities. The geeks of the Pacific Northwest Region stay busy by reinventing autocross from behind their computer keyboards.聽 Many of us got a peek into聽their sun-deprived imaginations when co-drivers Kevin Dietz and Mike Lillejord took their live-streaming broadcasts on the road last year, a concept fine-tuned during Seattle鈥檚 Slush Season mists. Over time, Brett Wilson has built a registration and timing platform that supports multiple clubs with a single driver sign-on and delivers in every flavor imaginable: raw and paxed times by event, by class and even standings for the seasons.
And now Dan Podhola has upped the ante with more of what every bench-racer craves: data.聽 The latest version of his site aggregates results from three local series, then slices and dices them to provide dozens of new ways to declare victory and highlight haplessness. Such as:
- Results, paxed results, and paxed results with a street tire modifier.
-聽 Crucial to bench racers everywhere: One-click pax of time-only runs, with your morning class applied to your fun runs.
-聽 Aggregated results by individual drivers over time, including how often you trophied and how often you won.
-聽 Head-to-head driver comparisons across multiple events, series and even years. (!)
-聽 Most cones, and average cones per run.
-聽 Number of runs during a season, or over many seasons.
Podhola piggybacked off Wilson鈥檚 home-grown scoring system, which feeds results via XML to his site. Ideally, he says, the data can highlight driver strengths and weaknesses. Who gets it done on their first runs? Who consistently cones away victory?聽 The former game programmer adds weather information, historical context and a little encouragement for noobs and veterans alike. His Trophy Room calls out podium finishes, victories in classes deeper than eight drivers and milestone events -- like your 10th or 100th -- something that might be useful in regions with perpetual novices.
Podhola says he鈥檚 working on a way to let drivers use Facebook accounts to claim their results, which could be pushed directly to their pages. And he鈥檇 like to be able to distinguish dry runs from wet runs, a matter of no small import in the Northwest.