Category: News

General news and information

2022 I.R.O.C. Champs Enshrined

After a grueling four-event racing series, on both road and oval courses, the best “drivers” have emerged.

IROC racing removes the advantage of a particular type or build of car and determines the best overall driver by pure driving and adapting abilities.

In IROC racing each driver has to drive a fixed car on each lane for a set number of laps or rotations. The driver is not allowed to change the car other than clean the tires and pickup shoes between each segment.

In the Stewart Raceway IROC series, all kinds of different cars, courses, and race formats were utilized to determine which drivers best adapted to the varied conditions and scored the most points in four different race day events.

Today, the following drivers were enshrined on the Stewart Raceway “Wall of Fame” for outstanding achievement in a very competitive racing series:

      • Kevin Webster (Sportsman)
      • George Peters (Expert)

Congratulations, Gentlemen!

 

2022 IROC Championship Spoils

Left to right: Expert Champ trophy, Sportsman Champ trophy.

Sportsman and Expert trophies await their rightful owners. Will the series be decided this Saturday, December 10? Or will the expected weather and real-life stuff force us to reschedule the finale and just do a track day?

George Peters has the Expert class championship pretty much locked up, while the Sportsman class is still very close between the top three drivers; Kevin Webster, Jerry Pearson, and Eric Lane.

We’ll see who shows up and what the consensus is. In any case, we’re going to do some racing tomorrow and see what this “squeeze” lane section does to the action.

Okay, shut up and drive (safely)!

 

 

Slot Car Racing Video Is Nice!

Still pursuing video recording of races at Stewart Raceway. The initial goal was to display the whole SR2 track on-screen, which was possible using inexpensive cameras. The next goal was to get the Race Management screens/windows in the recordings so viewers could see what the heck is going on.

Thanks to Open Source software developers, and just plain incredible talent in that realm, displaying the race management computer’s screen is possible. In fact, you can even display windows and areas of another remote or local computer’s screen–way cool!

So this video is a 10-lap segment race, utilizing fuel and tire allocation settings of SlotTrak’s RMS. SlotTrak is an amazing race management system.

YouTube player

Let me know your thoughts on this addition to the raceway. We can also do live streaming of race events with this setup. However, we have limits to how much data we can push to the Internet right now. That said, we could certainly live stream special events if warranted.

Okay, shut up and drive!

Video Might Be Nice

Well, I’ve had the equipment for well over a year now so I decided to play around with video recording races. At the moment, I’m trying it out on SR2, which is easier and more comfortable to test and dink around with this stuff.

I’m using cheap CCP 4K cameras, which are not ever going to produce professional looking video, but they are cheap. Right now I’m just focusing on capturing the whole track for the duration of a race. The issue with video is storage, just one heat of a short race can be as much as 10GB of data, depending on the length of the race.

H.O. scale racing adds another complexity in that the cars are the smallest and require the best possible capture resolution, which adds to the storage and video quality problems.

Anyway, this is my first crack at it. I need to work with my lighting director and improve in that area but it looks like–with a bit more tweaking–we can record a full race and be able to replay it, not only for posterity, but for entertainment and forensic evaluation afterwards.

YouTube player

Theoretically, I could also include the RMS screen (SlotTrak or RC) in the video, that would be way cool. I’ll work on the that soon.  After that, it’s going higher frame rates and producing good slo-mo action of crashes, starts, and finishes.

Please let me know what you think and any ideas you may have to make this more beneficial to us and our massive race fans.

Okay, shut up and drive!

George Peters Earns Spot On Stewart Raceway Wall Of Fame

The veteran Sportsman driver took home top honors in the final round of the NASCAR MADness Series on August 6, 2022. George not only won the five-race series, but he also won the Concours d’ Elegance competition as well.

George led the series from the end of the very first round and maintained a commanding lead in the points going into the final round. The only thing that could have stopped George from winning the series was his “real job” or a Shark’s game. Neither scenario played out, and George took the checkers in the final segment of the series well ahead of his closest rivals. Welcome to the Stewart Raceway Wall of Fame, George.

George’s Texaco Star Concours winner.

Congrats to George for winning his first series at Stewart Raceway and taking home the prestigious Concours d’ Elegance trophy. It is certainly rare when a driver not only wins races but also wins them in style. George produced a number of beautiful cars that were judged by both peers and independent judges to be the best detailed and crafted cars entered in several events throughout the series.

George’s MAC Tools NASTruck Concours winner.

The good news for Sportsman drivers is that George now has an average placing score that elevates him to an Expert driver classification. The bad news is that Expert drivers have yet another formidable driver to contend with on race day.

Okay, shut up and drive!