Anyone interested in Track days or racing I need your help

While away on a trip here recently I started thinking about getting back on the track this summer and how there are each year more and more people attending track days and driver education events. I was thinking back to the first track day I did a long time ago and was trying to remember what did I want most. Answer was a fairly comprehensive guide of the track I was going to drive...this same thing holds true today when I go to a new track.

So started looking around the web and found that the world was desperately short on a single good resource out there that gave people the information about various tracks such as turn by turn references, videos, or heck even contact and geographic location. So being that I work every day with the web I decided to start to throw something together.

Over the weekend here I hammered the infrastructure behind a wiki (online community editable encyclopedia) that has a goal of being the best reference for track information around that world. The webpage is http://www.trackpedia.com (its still in beta phase so there is a placeholder page that forwards you to the wiki at the moment) please go out and take a look.

Since I know a heck of a lot of the folks on here track their car regularly I figued this was a good place to test pilot my page and see what you all think as well as possibly get some folks on here contributing their wealth of knowledge on the tracks they have driven. I figure if I can start getting the folks on here contributing and then slowly expand out to other car clubs we should be able to create one hell of an online reference for everyone from the first time tracker to the seasoned racer.

Anyway if you all would please check out the site and let me know what you think. Feel free to add or modify what you want on the page (as thats the point of a wiki) and I will do my best here over the next few months while not working at my regular job to incorperate your comments to make the page better either with layout, information or other things. As I said if you want to help contribute as well by all means just go ahead I grant you free reign on the site.

Ferrarichat being my daily source of entertainment if of course the only forum listed in the wiki at the moment. Hopefully Rob doesn't mind the extra traffic I drive to him.

To skip the redirect just go to http://www.trackpedia.com/wiki

 

If you interested in seeing what I really want this site to become check out this link to one of the tracks I have completed (minus the GPS logging data which is a little hard to get in the snow) http://www.trackpedia.com/wiki/index.php?title=Mid_America_Motorplex

I have a new little GPS track toy that shows G's, track position, speed, braking points etc that I am going to write a flash program to render in my in car camera footage to give a sort of Forza or GT3 line through the video and then post that along with other cool info I can pull out of it.

Now if only I can get my car back together and finish my tranny I will be in business.

Also if any folks in Europe or the AP (aussy or Asia) wish to contribute I welcome the help. My buddy to helped create this with me over the weekend is from Ireland and has a good knowledge of some of the UK tracks but mainland Europe is different and AP is a different ball game.

 

hey i just registered and added a race track we have in Costa Rica, la guacima, i'll be putting more info on it as time goes by.
nice website!!!

 

Thanks a lot! I look forward to you adding content. The more the better! As you can see I have been adding stuff rapidly...just excited about it. Hope others start to contibute to as I have lots of turn by turn segments for tracks that need to be filled in like my Mid America one above.

 

you're welcome, just posted a link to a website that has in car videos of the last race, they are form several race cars so you can see wich lines do drivers choose

 

Very cool John!

 

Thanks John...I want to get more folks as visitors on the site to start contributing so I am screwing with navigation and what not to make it easier. It takes a heck of a lot of work to get the content up there now in place so I am looking for some help getting all the track guides, european tracks, etc filled out.

I know we have a lot of racers on here so I might repost this in the tech forums where most of us seem to hang out more often to start getting their feedback.

Either of you two guys have any feedback on content, layout etc that you would like to see modified or changed or does it flow pretty well?

 

awesome idea!! added to my bookmark list!

 

its ok, just that when posting pics or URL's is quite...umm...strange, maybe not used to it(the ways it shows up), it took me about 5 minutes to get to where you can post new tracks. not very simple but not hard

rolo

 

is there a spot on there for actual track dates ?

 

I am going to add the calendar for track dates here this week....just havent got that far along yet. Took me Friday->Sunday just to get the content up there as it is now so that everyone had something from which to start building on. I hate sites that want people to contirbute then have nothing up there.

Needless to say I expect to see a lot of change in the next 2 weeks cause I am going to dedicate my off hours to doing this while I wait to get my shocks back from Delta Vee on the site here.

 

Fantastic idea, and great initial implementation!

I'm going to add turn-by-turn for Barber in Alabama.

 

Mike thanks for the awesome update on Barber. You have exactly what I want to see us get to for all the tracks around the world eventually. The nice thing about the wiki is to that people can continue to add and refine further as time goes on for each track. I am going to have a wiki entry soon on racing equipment and will make sure to include your website for the help here.

For everyone else looking at the thread here is what Mike added to the barber wiki page http://www.trackpedia.com/wiki/index.php?title=Barber_Motorsports_Park to see the full Barber page, then click on "turn by turn guide to the Barber Motorsports Complex" or just follow this link. http://www.trackpedia.com/wiki/index.php?title=Turn_by_turn_guide_to_the_Barber_Motorsports_Park_track

 

For many years the Sports Car Club of America (SCCA) prepared very nice written summaries of the tracks that they used in the US and published them in Sports Car. They had turn-by-turn summaries by people like Elliott Forbes-Robinson. I have not seen any of them published lately, but this might be a resource you would want to look into. SCCA also has a very large web site with racing dates and such for each division and region. I raced on about a dozen tracks on the east coast and west coast during 33 years and found these summaries to be useful and accurate.
Ed Long

 

Well, I'd like to say I came up with it all on my own, but it's stuff I captured that USED to be on the Barber Motorsports website as a primer on how to drive their track, and then I've added some of my own personal experience. The original primer isn't there anymore -- it's been off the Barber website for at least a year and I don't know why -- but thankfully I saved part of it so I could print it out and review it for my own benefit and to share it with the other drivers when we hosted events there. Most tracks SHOULD have something like that for customers to use as a pre-orientation!

 

here is a link to a guide for Australia's Eastern Ck raceway
http://www.eventsoneill.com/templates/one/page/page_standard.php?secID=60

you could email the person that runs the page and ask him if you can use it for your data base

 

I think this is a great idea. I hope you stay with it, there's lot's of great tracks out there. Some that we frequent on the west coast: Willow Springs, Buttonwillow, Infineon, California Speedway, Thunderhill, Laguna Seca.

 

Thanks for the track link.

I hope to keep this up until everything is filled out. As I said I decided to bring it up on Ferrarichat first just to test a lot of things out and solidify it. For example tonight you cant register and then edit or add content because I am working on unifying the logins for the forums and the wiki. It should be back up and working tomorrow afternoon.

I hope that I can get more people contributing when I take this to Rennlist and some other forums for cars I have. As always the more feedback I get the better I can make the site and after tomorrow when folks can register again the more people I can get editing and contributing the way Mike has to really get the site to grow and mature.

 

Just an update here as well as a nag to get more folks to contribute if possible. I have updated more of the pages (added all the tracks I know of in France and Belgium) and messed with layout (another night till 4am) and also changed the registration process slightly to combine the two database together for the wiki and the bulletin board.

If you created an account (John, ROLOcr, and Mike C) your accounts wont work at the moment because I had to move database. If you would please just follow this link http://www.trackpedia.com/wiki/index.php?title=RegisterUser register again (using same username/pass you entered before) as described in that page and then you will be good to go for the life of the site. I got a little ahead of myself and should have got my DB's inline before hand but was just to excited to get the page live.

Also the site is spreading as a certain Ferrarichatter I respect greatly posted the site on rennlist which then propigated to the VW forms so we are getting a good deal of updates.

The site is changing pretty rapidly in the track section as far as content and layout to make it more user friendly. Some of the tracks updated are as followed.

http://www.trackpedia.com/wiki/index.php?title=Blackhawk_Farms

http://www.trackpedia.com/wiki/index.php?title=Watkins_Glen

http://www.trackpedia.com/wiki/index.php?title=La_Guacima

 

Gee, you got ads already?? I was interested till I saw that. Why act like its a 'for the love of the sport' venture? Why not call a spade a spade? Jim

 

Jim - As far as the ads go I have two small ads. None of which are intrusive and none of which are pop ups, underhanded or false links, or detract anything from the website. I placed them in a clear area so if you want to click on it you can if you dont then dont click on them. The content remains the same no matter what (there are no pay areas of the site, or gated access any where) WYSIWYG.

Bottom line is for me I have to pay for the monthly hosting of the site and software some how. If it means I have to put up two small ads (one to tirerack where I buy all my tires from anyway) its not the end of the world for me and much better than me bleeding red every month as the sites bandwidth requirements rise and my hosting costs go up (As much as I would like to spend all my track money this summer on the site what fun would that be). It takes cash to make a good site just stay alive as its user population grows because bandwidth on the net is not free and neither is disk space at the hosting site. Outside of this I don't care how many hours I put into the site, gas to the track events, cost of shipping my GPS in car system to various people to map tracks for us costs as I will eat all that because that is just for the love of the site.

Anyway the site IS for the love of putting cars on the track, racing and has the express purpose of trying to help everyone better understand what it takes to put your car on the track and be a repository of information in an easily searchable format.

Anyone who has ever met me knows that I did this mainly because I love motorsports and felt there was a need for this. If you feel the ads required to keep the site running and alive are worse than me having to charge a membership fee or cut off sections of the site later to pay the monthly bills then thats your opinion. But I would rather keep the content free for everyone to enjoy and reference and use whenever they need it.

 

A couple of ads doesn't make it a commercial venture, and aren't going to come close to offsetting the costs or time involved. Doesn't bother me one bit -- if it helps you keep up and enhance the site, more power to you. Don't worry about people who are inherently negative!

 

This might help with some of your reference info...

http://www.racingcircuits.net/

 

Well said. Thanks for your efforts!

 

Give me a break! The guy is just trying to pay the bills. Perhaps you would like to foot the bill for him.

Frankly, I think its a great idea, and if you happen to make some money....so be it. I think this is America and the free enterprise system still is in effect.

I am also quite happy to see that there are Fcar guys like me who track. In AZ, I can barely get any FCA people to 'think' about trackng their cars.