The Pit Road Officiating (PRO) technology, returning for its second year with a much higher comfort level entering next month’s Speedweeks at Daytona International Speedway, was on display earlier this week at the NASCAR Summit, the industry’s annual preseason convention for track services, medical, safety and security workers. The record number of almost 900 attendees for the Summit’s 15th year had the opportunity to tour the PRO trailer firsthand and learn about its intricacies. It turns out that many of the worries about the system heading into 2015 were unfounded. All of the system’s fail-safes performed as expected, and fears that the Pit Road Officiating trailer would be especially nitpicky in identifying infractions never materialized: Last year’s Daytona 500 tallied 29 pit-road violations, compared to 31 for the previous season and 28 in the year before that. The races that followed took a similar pattern.
‘We were pretty much really comfortable with everything, but going into Daytona, we were concerned that what if we have 100 penalties,’ Chad Little [NASCAR’s managing director in charge of technical inspection and officiating] said. ‘We don’t want to bog down the race with a bunch of travelling calls. We were real mindful of that, but we didn’t know exactly what we had because it’s a brand-new system. Those things develop throughout the year, but thank gosh we didn’t have any stumbling blocks at Daytona.’
Attendees at the NASCAR Summit received guidelines about how to best prepare their tracks for year two of the Pit Road Officiating structure. The seminar stressed the importance of uniformity in painting the bordering lines to pit boxes and the need to coordinate with NASCAR officials when mounting the 50 cameras that capture pit stop footage during the course of a race. Adhering to those instructions tends to make life easier for George Grippo, NASCAR’s managing director of technology field and media operations. Beyond the PRO system, his responsibilities include the logistics of the trackside TV compound, timing and scoring, user support and maintenance and all the wiring, cables and power needed to make the technology go. The biggest learnings from PRO’s first season, Grippo said, were that camera placement is paramount and that every track presents its own set of obstacles. Bristol Motor Speedway, for instance, had an accommodating roofline but cameras were mounted at much higher angles than a larger track such as Michigan International Speedway, where cameras were placed over the top row at the back of the grandstands at a greater distance. At Sonoma Raceway, cameras were located on a makeshift mount on heavy scissor-lift equipment aimed at pit road.
But even as NASCAR officials learned more about the PRO system’s nuances, teams also picked up a few tricks of the trade. Among them, Grippo said, was the practice of wearing uniforms or shoes that matched the color of pit road ‘ from off-white concrete to the darker grays from more freshly laid asphalt. The lack of contrast, Grippo explained, could potentially help crewmembers muddle officials’ task of determining whether a team member has come over the wall too soon. ‘The teams are no dummies,’ Grippo said. ‘They see the video, too, because we provide that video for them as a training piece. They can figure some of that stuff out. If I’m going to Dover, I’m wearing a white sneaker so that nobody can tell that I’m hitting the concrete versus a black shoe. They don’t do anything to help us, that’s for sure. They get smarter as we go along.’(NASCAR.com)
