It is a little ridiculous, but: Even though I have not turned a single lap, yet, I’m already thinking about lap timing. Don’t get me wrong, this is not about sheer speed as such. I don’t want to know my times to brag about them, but to keep track of my progress. So the goal is not to get fast, but to get faster with time, to develop my driving skills and to see how fast they’re developing. Of course, this will not be very important in the beginning. My first track day will likely be under less than perfect conditions. It will be cold, I will be running winter tyres and the way the weather is at the moment, there is a high chance of it being wet. But there will be progress nonetheless. I’ll be slow on my very first lap and (hopefully) less slow at the end of the day. And having an objective measurement will increase fun. Which is what it’s all about.

So what timing solutions are there? I browsed the internet quite a bit in the last days and quickly realised that there are plenty. But most of them are not an option. They’re either too complicated or too expensive. There’s the well known PerformanceBox for example, which seems like an easy to use pretty accurate tool with tons of features. But it’s way too expensive for me. There are 2D datarecording systems which are also way too expensive and more for the professional user. There’s AIM with the Mychron Light as it’s cheapest solution, which is not that expensive, but still too expensive for what it provides. Also, you need at least one infrared lap timing beacon set up at the track, which makes it a little complicated. I’m sure there are plenty of other products available, either GPS based or working with an infrared transmitter or even with an inductive loop, which the STC doesn’t have.

What I found to be the best solution for my needs and my budget is actually a little programme for my mobile phone. It took me quite some time to find it. The first one I stumbled across was the RaceChrono software, apparently developed by some finnish Carfreaks (they have a very stylish blog, which can now be found in my link list by the way). This seemed to offer all I needed, but unfortunately it doesn’t work on my Nokia 6300 because it has the wrong operating system. But luckily I found a very similar programme that’s Java based. It goes by the telling name of GPS Lap Timing and is available for my mobile. It installed with no problems and seems to be working fine. I’ll spare the details of how it works and what it can do (for further information you might want to check out the developers website), but all I need for it to work is a bluetooth GPS receiver and I’m set. Of course this will not be as accurate as many other solutions, but it will only cost around 60 to 120 Euro depending on the GPS receiver. The full programme is only 9.99€, so that’s all you have to pay if you already have a GPS mouse. And it should be plenty for my current needs – if it works properly, that is. Due to lack of a GPS receiver, I couldn’t test it, yet. So more on that topic will follow as soon as I found a proper GPS mouse.