What you are about to read is not quite what was planned. As I wrote earlier, I had planned a second track day for the weekend at the STC. It didn’t happen unfortunately. And even more unfortunate: I was not aware of that until I arrived at the STC around 2:15 pm yesterday. And found the track to be closed.

How come? Well, one of the main purposes of this facility is to provide “free driving” for everybody. And while the STC does offer instructed track days (which are classed as race track safety trainings), most of the time you can just show up, pay your fee and get out on the track to turn laps on your own. So these work basically like the Tourist Days at the Nürburgring Nordschleife, with the difference that traffic rules don’t apply. Yesterday was one of those “Tourist Days” and as you can see from the online-calendar, the facility was supposed to be open, which it wasn’t. I don’t know why it was closed and have not had a reply from the operators, yet, but closed it was. Thus I wasted around 2.5 hours of my life and around 140 kilometers worth of petrol.

Anyway. Instead of writing a track day report, I decided to give you a little update on my timing solution, the GPS Lap Timing software which can be used with a GPS receiver and a mobile phone. As mentioned earlier, on my first track day, it strangely put out times that were entirely flat to a second, although it was supposed to calculate times down to a hundredth of a second. After some further testing and always finding the same results, I contacted Albert, the developer of GPS Lap Timing, a Computer Science Engineer and motor sports enthusiast who is into amateur karting. He developed the timing software as a personal project.

After explaining my problem to him, he promised to fix the issue and send me a revised version a few days later. Sure enough, he kept to his promise. And after receiving the updated software and some more testing performed, I can say that it now seems to work just as it’s supposed to. So, GPS Lap Timing is definitely worth a recommendation. You can test it for free (timing sessions are limited to five minutes) and the full programme is only 9.99 Euro. For that you get a timing solution that should be as accurate as the inherent inaccuracy of GPS positioning allows and an impeccable customer support. I only wish I could have used it a little more extensively on the track yesterday. Oh, well.

If you’re interested in how GPS Lap Timing works and why it probably failed on me at first, you can check out a rather boring and technical, yet very noobish explanation of how I understand it here.

Update, 12/12/07: I uploaded two pictures of my rather lonely looking Clio I took at the STC last sunday (click on them for larger versions). Didn’t have a proper camera with me, so the mobile had to do. Worse, I completely overlooked that giant pole which appears to be growing out of the roof of the Clio in the front picture.