DAYTONA, Florida – January 24, 2017 – P1Software, a GarageLabs, LLC venture, this week announced the availability of P1TS, software that helps race strategists and engineers make informed real-time race decisions by improving situational awareness from timing and scoring data. This marks the third year of its availability and use by professional motorsports teams competing in IMSA, and the first year that it is not bundled with other software, and is marketed, distributed, and licensed directly to customers.
Just as traders use stock market tickers and dashboards to understand the real-time pulse of the market, P1TS enables race strategists and engineers to more easily see what is happening during a race. Live information is presented both graphically and tabularly, allowing users to more easily see overall patterns as well as study quantitative data.
Track Map is a new panel that models car movement based upon each individual car’s past sector performance. Unlike many other systems, critical quantitative information is also presented including class position, positional deltas, closing rates, and pitstop deltas. Design inspiration was drawn from other highly visual real-time information systems including aircraft controller and fighter displays.
Strat 1 is a new single page view for those customers with large high resolution displays wanting to see everything simultaneously. It targets those with laptops at arm’s length away who want to study information without shifting eye focus to different displays. The classic multi-tabbed Strategist view remains, allowing teams to use multiple large screen monitors where each displays information on a single strategy aspect.
Asked about what differentiates P1TS from other competing software, engineer and owner Ken Lin talked about his design philosophy, from over 30 years of software engineering experience.
Rather than starting with the goal of copying other vendor’s software features, I instead concentrate on the critical problems that race strategists and engineers are trying solve, and address those through my experiences in #software, #dataviz, and #datascience. This is also reflected in the User Guide, which is not framed as a grab bag of features to puzzle over, but instead, is organized as problems to be solved.
Also, in general I’m not a fan of software that leaves it up to the user to make lots of decisions on how to set and arrange things in a useful way – to me that sometimes indicates not clearly understanding what the customer needs, so instead asks the customer to figure it out. Our customer market is fairly narrow, so I find it better to instead take the time to really work with the engineers and understand what they are doing and why. In the racing world, you have Colin Chapman’s “simplify, then add lightness” approach. In both cars as well as software, you create a better experience. This lightness is especially important as there’s little time to waste at the track.
Close work with customers I guess, is in one sense, the real differentiator. So my thanks go to them.
More information about P1TS may be found at its website, p1ts.com.
Inquiries may be sent to info@p1software.com.
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