CONCORD, N.C. — In April 2013, NASCAR hired Gene Stefanyshyn to help the sports property incorporate new forms of technology and innovations into both the racing product and fan experience.
The now Senior Vice President of Innovation and Racing Development has also had a watchful eye on how racing competition can be advanced through different integrations and improvements, with the goal to always be thinking about ways of leveraging technology to enhance the sport.
Stefanyshyn recently sat down with SportTechie to discuss his team’s key areas of emphasis, how technology is impacting fans in 2016 and other technology advancements NASCAR has recently rolled out.
On where he and his team place their focus from a general innovation standpoint … “There’s really three areas we focus on. One is to improve the quality of our racing. Basically, we put the fan at the top of the list. Everything we do is for the fan. We’re in racing, but we’re in the entertainment business. So we view our competitors as baseball, football, hockey, whatever, other race series. We don’t just look at it like we’re just competing against IndyCar or F1. We look at it and say, ‘We’re an entertainment business. How do we create a compelling product that our fans will invest their time to watch our sport?’ Very fan-centric, improve the quality of racing. Another one is safety — the safety of the driver and the safety of the fan. There are incidents on tracks, and we have to make sure none of that finds its way into the fans who are there watching the race. Then of course it’s safety for our officials who are there. We have quite a few on pit road. Safety is also very, very big for us. The third one is efficiency or cost containment. We understand it is critical for us to not let costs escalate tremendously, which historically happens in racing. You can look at F1, for example. Most teams there are factory teams. … We spend a lot of time looking at the rules, and when we write a rule, we have a range of ownership from pretty sophisticated teams and engineers with 500 at Hendrick Motorsports to a guy like (team owner) Tommy Baldwin, Jr. who has five engineers. So, when we write a rule we have to ask ourselves, ‘Will this work for them, and will it give them some kind of advantages to the big guys and not the little guy?’ So, efficiency and cost are very important to us. We have to have 40 guys racing every weekend. We have to make the barriers to entry fairly low.”
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On improving the overall fan experience … “We want the racing product to be exciting but at the same time, if there’s an incident on the track, we want to clean it up quickly. Or if it’s going to rain, and we have a TV schedule, we have to dry the track. The fan experience isn’t just the race product. It’s also everything that supports the race product — whether it’s trying to handle the rain, the cleanup, how we officiate the race.”
On the two-year-old automated pit road officiating system … “We put in an automated pit road officiating system where we have 46 cameras that have intricate software that can actually make the call. … We actually ran it for three quarters of a year in parallel as a beta with our manual system. We trained our people, refined the software and then we began to bring the teams in and say, ‘Hey, here’s the new world. This is coming next year.’ When we rolled it out, it was pretty bulletproof because we had done it in beta for three quarters of a year. It worked pretty good. We added some cameras, focused on pit road. We added cameras to pit in, pit out. … We have two cameras around each pit box, so if one fails we’re fine. The cameras there are anti-vibration so if there’s wind. They self-focus and all of that. We have to map all of the pit boxes, though, to support that. It’s loaded into the software, and the computer knows that. We then load in the math model of the car and then from there, we know the length and the center of the car. … This brought a whole other level of accuracy and fairness. I would say it’s been pretty well-received by the teams. They had to do a lot of work because before you had to do it with a human eye. Imagine you’re an official, and the car is 100 feet away. Did he cross the line or not coming at your 60 miles an hour?”
On how high tech the officiating system really is … “Part of our journey is introducing smart technology into officiating for fairness but also so people have the right image of us. Some people, it’d be safe to say, still think of us as fairly old school, but I think that’s changed a lot. The computers in that automated pit road officiating system, I think the numbers are, it’s got like 100 times as much computing power as the last NASA rocket or something like that. There’s a lot of computation capability in there.”
On the cars’ new digital display dashboard … “We want to get to the world of eventually getting to have the car communicate to the race tower and then we can communicate to the car through telematics. One of the first steps is we want to send information into the car like a yellow flag, green flag, where he or she is on the restart. … If you can imagine a screen pops up and shows the two cars in front of you, the two behind you and then you have a flashing light saying where you need to be. Also, we could notify drivers of penalties. Right now, we have the display in the car. As we introduce telematics, we can shoot information into the car and also pull information out of it. … The drivers have about 16 screens that they can display.”