News – Page 7 – Stewart Raceway

The 2022 Racing Season Is In The Books

Given the holiday hustle & bustle, it’s not likely we’ll be able to pull off another race day event this year. As such, our season officially ended after the 2022 IROC Championship finale on December 10.

First off, I’d like to thank all of you who stuck with our program and attended as many races/events as you could. Kathy and I really appreciate your loyalty, interest, and friendship.

We’ve had a wild ride this season, for sure. The season started out well but once we made the planned switch to HOPRA rules, we lost a few drivers. Not only that, we lost those drivers while we were trying to bring a new 6-lane Brad Bowman track online. Nothing is more impactful than losing participation when you’re increasing racing capacity by 50 percent.

In spite of that setback, we also added a few new drivers to the group in 2022. These new drivers are entering a program that is very well-positioned to both encourage and cultivate new participants in this great hobby we all have loved for most of our lives.

So, again, I really appreciate those of you who stuck with the program and made it as successful as it has been. We’ve done a whole lot of different types of racing, with all kinds of different types of cars, body styles, racing formats, etc. And through it all, the competition has been extremely close and the racing super exciting and–most important–fun.

So who were the top dogs in the two different driver classifications we currently offer?

2022 Sportsman Class Standings

Place	Name	Laps	Points	Total Time
1	Kevin Webster	6861	454	55303.45
2	Jordan Walker	5483	315	47097.53
3	Jerry Pearson	1949	167	21366.55
4	Eric Lane	915	69	7651.906
5	Gabe Maddox	35	29	218.53
6	Kathy Stewart	120	16	394.248
7	Martha Elderon	204	9	1020.019
8	Jared Johnson	122	7	1576.468
9	Madeline Johnson	105	5	1650.493

2022 Expert Class Standings

Place	Name	Laps	Points	Total Time
1	George Peters	9674	862	69452.86
2	Greg Kondrek	4490	379	19191.5
3	Ian Douglass	3530	344	15465.58
4	Brad Sandahl	3157	265	25463.15
5	Russ Toy	3180	197	15957.58
6	Randy Cook	136	13	1566.557
7	Steve Stewart	10607	1182	70235.96

Again, congratulations to Kevin and George. They love racing these little cars and it clearly shows in the results they’ve achieved.

I hope everyone enjoyed the 2022 Stewart Raceway season and certainly hope all of you return for the 2023 season. We’re going to stick to our rule set and overall program in the hopes of growing our ranks by making it easier, more affordable, and more competitive–for more racers.

Stay tuned for the 2023 racing schedule and a couple of exciting additions to the program. Happy Holidays to all of you!

Okay, shut up and drive!

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.

[embedyt] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Mp0UH0ZbSdY[/embedyt]

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.

[embedyt] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FAA9HaAAiE8[/embedyt]

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!