Category: Video

Posts with video content or related information.

Final Round of 2023 50/50 Xtreme Series Captured On Video

Yep, we video-recorded all four official races of Round 4. Could be a little boring since we didn’t have enough marshals to pull off a normal race, so there are a lot of yellow flags and other interruptions. However, you can fast forward, rewind, skip, whatever. The bottom line is you can learn a lot about reviewing how you did during a race.

Check out what’s here and let me know what you think. Lots to work out, including better lighting, presentation, and plenty of other improvements.

Okay, shut up and drive!

SR3 Video Session: Qualifying Session with SlotTrak

First crack at video recording on SR3. It’s a bit larger track and difficult to get one shot of the whole course. This is a qualifying session with a Viper V-SPEC car using a typical Indy-style qual session.

YouTube player

Some lighting issues to resolve but might work for recording races. If not, will have to do dual cameras to break the track into two sections and get a better capture of the action.

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!

Stewart Raceway II’s Clone

YouTube player

Yes, SR2 has a clone. After Dan Cronin of Viper Scale Racing finished building SR2, he quickly made another version. The only difference I can see is that he spaced out the pit and start/finish gantries to make fuel races a bit easier than the original version of SR2.

The original SR2 was designed by me but with a whole lot of input from local racers who own routed tracks and have raced on some of the most magnificent racing tracks ever built.

SR2-2 is no longer in Utah at Viper’s facility but it is still in use. In fact, the last time I saw it was at Musgrave Racing’s shop in Riverside, CA.

Right-click and open the image in a new tab to see a larger image.

SR2-1 is still alive and well in the Santa Cruz Mountains. We haven’t raced on it in a while but I recently did a whole bunch of laps on it building two new Tyco-Jets for my IROC fleet. It is a very cool layout and the fact that it has multiple layouts, as well as converts to an oval, is very special.