It’s race day. On the 1.99-mile road course, 38 cars roar in a blazing blur of team colors and engine thunder. Midway through the event, a NASCAR official peers into that speedy swirl to find one specific car due for a pit stop.
“Sounds simple, right? It can take a minute,” said John Probst, NASCAR managing director of competition innovation. “Even five to 10 seconds is a long time in our sport. Every second counts.”
Now, there’s a tool to do that task in true NASCAR style – fast. With the race management app, built by NASCAR and Microsoft on Windows 10, race officials can click on a car number and instantly see that driver’s position on the track – or learn when the car got fresh tires or will next stop for fuel. NASCAR officially launched it Sunday for the Toyota/Save Mart 350 at Sonoma Raceway.
The app, introduced in 2016, includes new components like “freeze the field,” which combines video and positioning that helps NASCAR break down live race video and post-race footage to spot when and exactly where cars were located on the track. Officials also can use the app to see – on a single window – how much time the race has been run under green, yellow and red flags; how many cars are in the garage; and whether pit road penalties occurred.
NASCAR officials use a tablet to keep the race safe. (Photo by Integrated Talent)
“Running a race requires many people consuming data from many different sources and then coordinating that information into a seamless operation,” Probst said. “Historically, this information and data has been presented in a piecemeal form – little bits of information spread across many monitors or printed on individual sheets of paper.
“With the race management app, we are able to combine all of this information and present it to officials in a logical way. One application, one display,” Probst said.
Within NASCAR, officials are adopting new technologies to make their races fairer and safer – while also leveraging Microsoft tools like SharePoint to move their Super Bowl-sized event from city to city, 38 times a year. And at Hendrick Motorsports, 12-time NASCAR Cup Series champions, engineers are increasingly tapping tech to snip off fractions of seconds from pit stops and lap times.
In fact, decades of innovation within motor sports have helped lead the tech boom now rumbling throughout the larger sports landscape, from soccer to golf to high school football. It is a milestone moment, expert say, as more leagues, teams and competitors apply tools like Azure Machine Learning and Microsoft artificial intelligence solutions to achieve a singular goal: winning.
Intelligent guesses and gut instincts alone don’t cut it any longer on the track or on the field of play. Top performers are capturing and organizing the tremendous reservoir of raw data generated by their races and games – then using tools like predictive analytics to make smarter decisions, said Mike Downey, director of sports technology engineering at Microsoft.
Tech age in sports
“You could describe the current wave of tech transformation as a pivotal moment across all of sports. It’s up there with the Industrial Revolution and the Iron Age,” Downey said. “It’s the tech age in sports. It’s huge, and hugely transformational.”
Microsoft Consulting Services partnered with NASCAR to develop the race management app on Windows 10, with data and video stored in Microsoft’s Azure cloud platform. The app combines into one screen six data categories – historical data, timing and scoring, pit road officiating, video replay and car positioning.
From the people who officiate the action on the track to those managing everything from the safety vehicles in the Race Control hub, the app is streamlining operations, said Betsy Grider, managing director of technology development at NASCAR.
“When you have incidents on track or big wrecks, it’s high pressure, high stress,” Grider said. “After safety and medical situations are taken care of, you want to get those cars back to racing as soon as possible. Using a master app that allows you to jump in and out of different functions live, that puts everything (that’s happening) on one single pane of glass, it really helps operationally.”
Policing the pits
NASCAR has also integrated Microsoft Surface Dial into the app. The hardware tool is the size of a hockey puck and works with Microsoft Surface Studio and Surface Pro to activate hidden software features, freeing up hands for other tasks. NASCAR race officials are using Surface Dial in the app’s “infraction video” feature, which captures video to monitor pit stops for violations, said Stephen Byrd, NASCAR director of technology integration and development.
“We can now have multiple officials review and scrutinize these videos, using the Dial to play the clip on a granular level, frame by frame, so they can analyze what happened in real time, literally saving us seconds,” Byrd said. “That’s important because we want to be able to issue a penalty before that car (in violation) makes a full, complete lap. Time is of the essence.”
When the race is done, the work really starts. NASCAR is not a light packer. The entire race event –communication and broadcast hubs, cars, computers and camshafts – gets assembled and hauled in tractor-trailers to the next track in the next city for the next race.
Haulers lined up at Sonoma Raceway carry the cars, parts, tools and NASCAR equipment from city to city. (Photo by Integrated Talent)
“Just imagine lifting up three square city blocks of Manhattan and trying to move them around the country. The logistical operation compares to what you might see in the Olympics or the Super Bowl. But we’re doing it every weekend,” Grider said.
To pull all of that together, NASCAR employees stay in communication through Microsoft SharePoint, which offers a secure place to store, share, organize and access information from almost any device. (NASCAR is headquartered in Daytona Beach, Florida.) They also use Microsoft Office 365, a cloud-connected service that includes Exchange Online for email, SharePoint Online for collaboration and a suite of Office Web Apps.
‘The tech is staggering’
For NASCAR’s most decorated team, Hendrick Motorsports, technology fuels how crew chiefs and engineers hammer out race strategy, make decisions about the cars and manage crucial race-day communications.
“The technology in this sport now is staggering,” said Taylor Moyer, a race engineer with Hendrick Motorsports. He’s one of three engineers who work on the No. 5 Chevrolet SS driven by Kasey Kahne.
Hendrick Motorsports engineer Taylor Moyer. (Photo by Integrated Talent)
Three weeks before each race, Moyer and the other engineers begin compiling a large report on the track, the car and other aspects of the looming competition. They upload all their files into Microsoft OneDrive, which allows them to store, share and sync their information to the cloud. Throughout race weekend, as they gather data from Friday practices and Saturday qualifying runs, they continue building that report, Moyer said.
“We live on Microsoft Teams, OneNote and OneDrive. That allows us to have connectivity at all times. It also allows us to have a personal life, which is a huge thing because, even on our days off, we have to be able to communicate with the shop,” Moyer said. “I wake up, have my morning coffee and eggs on the porch, and work on a (race) simulation. I can drop it in OneDrive, it shows up at the shop, and the other engineers have it.
“The whole time we’re at the track, we’re also dumping files in there. And you have that report everywhere – on your phone, on the morning van ride in,” Moyer said. “It allows us to do so much more with the time we have. The only thing you can’t get more of is time.”
Then there’s the race-planning info he shares with Kahne, who carries a Microsoft Surface tablet equipped with OneDrive.
“Drivers get pulled everywhere for different obligations, but all that time he and I are in constant communication,” Moyer said. “When I’m done with my work – race prep for him – I’ll drop it in his OneDrive file. He can be sitting at home with Tanner, his son. When Tanner goes to bed, he can just open it up and there’s my work. It’s so easy.”
The files they share touch on strategy for the upcoming race. They also include data from previous races Kahne ran at that track – or races run there by the other three Hendrick Motorsports drivers: Jimmie Johnson, Dale Earnhardt Jr. and Chase Elliott. Items they discuss may include lap times, speed, tire pressures and temperatures, wear on the vehicle, plus previous driver comments on steering, throttle and braking.
After Kahne reads and assesses that info, he often chats with Moyer via the flexible, chat-based workspaces within Microsoft Teams.
NASCAR driver Kasey Kahne at Sonoma Raceway. (Photo by Integrated Talent)
“Taylor really feeds me a majority of the information that I’m looking for each week – our plan and how we can best attack the race weekend,” Kahne said. “We’re looking back at prior races at that track, what we did to the car to make it go fast and how to use some of those items again.
“It really gives me a head start going into a race weekend. Then, I can keep track of it all weekend long (via OneDrive) and know exactly what the guys are doing to be prepared and set for the race on Sunday.”
On race day, Moyer sits atop the pit box and uses Teams as a digital communications hub amid the roaring engines and frantic competition. For example, as Kahne is driving down pit road, Moyer and the team’s fueler have a quick fueling decision to make—one that could win the race. On their screens, they read fuel consumption data and chat about the fuel’s weight, its volume and the car’s speed – a precise relationship. When Kahne stops his No. 5 car, the fueler pumps in a precise amount of fuel and Kahne is quickly back on the track.
But in that frantic moment, the technology shaved precious seconds off the decision and the pit stop.
“If I can get the data out of the race car faster, I can make a decision faster,” Moyer said. “I absolutely wouldn’t be able to do my job without these tools.”
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From pit stop to checkered flag—
NASCAR drives productivity through cloud-based IT innovation
In the midst of the deafening noise and speed of a NASCAR race, even mundane tasks like changing a tire become heroic. It’s the same with the technology we employ; simple tasks like collaborating on documents and sharing files support the essential teamwork that is at the core of the NASCAR enterprise. When the Technology Integration and Development team at NASCAR chose Microsoft Office 365, we knew we had found a platform that would simplify how we produce the exciting sporting events that are the NASCAR legacy. Today, we are about 25 percent migrated to Office 365, including SharePoint Online and OneDrive for Business.
To say our business is mobile is an understatement; NASCAR holds 38 events a year all over the country. This means setting up the compound infrastructure, arranging catering and coordinating travel for our employees. For 10 months of the year, we are a traveling circus. It’s a huge undertaking, and it’s crucial that all the aspects of our operation run smoothly. In the past, the logistics of coordinating these events came down to printing out huge runbooks and relying on email to make sure everyone had the correct information before race day. That has fundamentally changed with the introduction of Office 365 and, specifically, SharePoint Online collaboration team sites. Using SharePoint Online, we created a brand-new intranet called Inside Track that employees use to collaborate simultaneously on documents, update spreadsheets in real-time and securely access the information they need on the road or from the track. Productivity is at a peak level in the company, and we’re setting up new races with maximum efficiency.
The company is also piloting Microsoft Teams to take chat-based teamwork to the next level. We have lofty expectations that Microsoft Teams can handle the extremely fast-paced collaboration that must happen trackside and in the pit. For example, we are interested to see if we can use Microsoft Teams to ascertain if a penalty has been handed out, rather than hopping on a radio channel or the phone.
Our fast-paced industry is unique, but NASCAR’s security concerns are much like those of any large enterprise. After doing our due diligence, we felt confident that the Microsoft cloud-based products were among the best in their class when it came to cloud security. We are confident that with Office 365 and a custom app built in PowerApps, we can easily manage data access for all of our employees and hundreds of freelance contractors to ensure everyone gets the information they need to get their work done.
The Technology Integration and Development team at NASCAR was born out of a single question: How do we empower the business to get more done? We chose Office 365, with its mobile-first, cloud-first benefits, to give our employees the best tools for working at the office or at the track. Putting a race together requires the same coordinated teamwork you see in the pit, and with Office 365 and SharePoint Online, we’re driving productivity into a new era of time- and cost-savings. That’s great news for NASCAR
Microsoft will sponsor Dale Earnhardt Jr. for two upcoming races this season, including Sunday's road-course race at Sonoma Raceway, as part of a technology partnership with Hendrick Motorsports.
Both NASCAR and Hendrick Motorsports will adopt the Windows 10 platform and Microsoft Azure to deliver technology solutions to help improve performance on and off the track.
“NASCAR and Hendrick Motorsports are perpetual innovators in motorsports,” Steve Guggenheimer, a Microsoft vice president, said in a news release. “This sport demands constant innovation, to have its boundaries pushed, so that the sport delivers the exciting experiences expected by fans."
NASCAR's 12-time most popular driver will also don the Microsoft colors for the Aug. 2 race at Pocono.
“I’m a big technology user and really enjoy Microsoft products,” Earnhardt said in a release. “Kicking off the Hendrick Motorsports relationship with Windows 10 is a unique opportunity, and there’s no doubt our ongoing technical partnership will help us raise the bar in many areas. It’s great to see Microsoft is having such a positive experience with NASCAR and wants to do more across the sport. We’re excited to be a part of that.”
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