Sideways Data Kickoff!

Posted by Devon W. on May 13, 2024, 8:19 p.m.

Summary

This past weekend was the first event to use SidewaysData for combined registration and live timing.

We onboarded five new people to the platform (the organizer, Sanjay, and four racers). They all were really understanding and quick learners, and picked up the combined Registration & Timing app in no time.

We had great feedback from competitors and organizers, both positive and negative. Based on this first event, we have lots of things we plan to tweak and features we'd like to add to better support these types of events going forward.

Upcoming Changes

Based on feedback, we will be tackling the following items:

• Current events disappear from the homepage, because the homepage shows events with Open registration. This will be adjusted.
• Timing Table captions will be improved.
• Some issues with timing not loading on some iPhones was found, and this will be fixed.
• We will add a Place # column to live timing tables.
• We will add a Diff column to live timing tables.
• The Live Results page will have a "Event Day" selection added for multi-day events. Today it simply shows the results for all days in separate tables.
• Timing App: After watching a few people learn and use the system, we will be making some usability improvements and adding checks to prevent some more common mistakes that can slow down events, for example queuing up the same car in grid twice.
• Timing App: We will be adding export to CSV features for entries and times.
• We will also soon be supporting PAX for timing. The system will automatically auto-update the PAX modifiers as new ones are released. Past events will retain their old PAX modifiers. This is currenty in development.

Background

This was a two day event, with entrants registering online, and on-site. Sideways Data was used for online and on-site registration as well as timing cars on course, multiple cars at a time, both days. Timing was done with the FarmTek Polaris timing console, with times automatically populating the online live timing.

This was a CRS (California Rally Series) event hosted by Sanjay and sponsored by Sonsray Machinery AG. There were also additional sponsors, ACT Clutches, 303 Care Cleaning, and EBC Brakes, thanks to the Calfornia Rally Cross Association.