The Nextel Pit Crew Challenge, first-ever indoor event oficially sanctioned by NASCAR, was held last night at Charlotte Coliseum in front of 10,000 fans. The TV show will air this Saturday (May 21) on FX Network @ 6PM EDT, just before the Nextel All-Star Challenge race from Lowes Motor Speedway in Charlotte.

To say producing the timing and live TV graphics was a challenge is an understatement. This event required the most complex timing system I've ever designed & deployed. I had to write custom timing & scoring software to keep track of 12 running clocks simultaneously, feeding them all in real time via GRFX framebuffer interface to NASCAR Images Digital TV Productions. We also provided a CIS (Commentator Information System) to the arena, and three different interfaces to an old crappy Trans-Lux octagonal scoreboard array which hopefully will be dynamited when the Charlotte Colisseum is blown up next month to make way for a new arena.

If any TimingGuys members are thinking of doing biz with Trans-Lux, don't. The ops guys at Charlotte Coliseum had nothing but bad things to say about Trans-Lux, and the Coliseum regretted not buying their scoreboards from Daktronics.

The organizer of this event, JHE Productions, is one of the coolest companies I've worked with in a long time. JHE is owned by a very clever & creative guy named Jay Howard. Check out their web site at WWW.GOJHE.COM. JHE is basically in the extravaganza business; they do things like erecting massive staging and sound systems in 10 minutes so that rock stars can play 2 songs at halftime of NFL games. Their biggest client is NASCAR, but they're involved with many other sports and motorsports series such as IRL. Among their ongoing projects for NASCAR is producing the Klein Tools vintage airshow at many NASCAR events.

We used triple-redundant timing systems based around ALGE S4 timers, backed up by Lynx photofinish.

This wasn't anything like the unsanctioned contest held last week at the Crew Chief's Club. The other event used very simple rules and a very elementary timing system originally designed by The Fred to keep track of sandwich-making contests. This NEXTEL contest was more complex by several orders of magnitude, but it was quite a spectacle. The crowd was cheering so loudly that headsets were useless. We had to use hand signals.

Many thanks to the Broder's Skunkware onsite SWAT team: Jim Karnes of SportsTimingUSA.COM, Tami Strong of Absolute Precision Timing, and Christo Wilson of the University of California Computer Science Department.

Writing the software for this was actually the easy part. The difficult part - since nothing like this had ever been done before - was deciding what to use for hardware and wiring. I figured much of it out myself, but Fred Patton, Doug DeAngelis, and Ted Savage provided much-needed and much-appreciated hardware advice. What a luxury to have the best in the business as consulting resources.

Christo and Karnes examine Jeff Gordon's #24 DuPont Chevrolet out in the staging area.

KarnesAndChristoandJeffGordonsCarLR.jpg (47 Kb, 27 downloads)

Tami and Jim calibrate the Lynx cameras a few hours before the event

TamiAndKarnes2LR.jpg (48 Kb, 25 downloads)

The crew introductions were spectacular. The fact that Jay Howard got insurance and permission from the fire department to set off this many explosions indoors in an arena full of people was, in my mind, the most spectacular aspect of the event.

IntroductionsLR.jpg (48 Kb, 23 downloads)