Logistics and Operations

This page is a dumping ground for lessons about logistics and operations at the track.

Prepping

The Day Before

Packing

• Boxes should be written in sharpie on atleast 2 sides and a top indicating their contents. It was extremely useful to say the “fluids” box. Or the “wiring” box.
• Some cars will get to location at different times of day. Some things are strictly needed by a certain time. It can be easier to indicate this by arranging the garage “front to back”, with things that should be loaded on the first available car in the front.
• Take care to arrange all the stuff in the garage to say, “everything on the floor between X and Y must go to competition”.

Test Day

The test day sticker can be different from I passed Lemons inspection sticker. Make sure you have both on (or atleast the test day sticker) when going out on track.

We got to Thunderhill at about 12:00, 1 hr before check-in, and of course, all the pitboxes in the shade were taken. But we did manage to find a pit box between two really experienced teams. That was really awesome because we asked them questions and borrowed tools all weekend.

The final touches for your car

These are the things you don’t think about until you’ve watched a few lemons racing videos inside the cockpit and you see the things they do.

• Big clock inside the car
  • Helps the driver understand how long they’ve been in the car, and how much longer they expect to be in the car. No way in hell they’re looking at their phone
• Ultrawide rear view
  • We ordered two ultra wide mirrors and tapped them together and both onto the real rearview mirror so you got infinite ultrawide.
• We added towels taped down on the back “dash” below the rear windscreen. This was extremely helpful for reducing glare.

Race Day(s)

• Emphasize safety first!

Sus things we did since we’re a new team

• As a new team, I knew that once we got on track the car would probably throw a few more codes.
  • Whoever is first on track should probably bring an equipment/phone on track that can scan OBD2 codes

Paranoia Checks

Anything you zip tie, and especially zip ties that you have to replace because you find that they break will break again eventually. Make sure you reason about why some zip tie broke, and if you can’t address that root cause, know that you need to be inspecting for wear/replacement

24 Hr Specific

We were overstaffed during the day, and severely understaffed at night. It’s really exciting in the first 2 or 3 hours to have everyone around, but if you want to go 24 hrs in your first race make sure you plan out your shifts and send people to bed early!

Communication

We found that at the Thunderhill track, we had great communication via LTE phone call with two Verizon phones + wired earbuds. One for the driver, and one for the radio operator.

• This was better than the radio because push to talk for our radios was very un-usable.
  • Given that the radio is half duplex we can’t just be always on.
• There was one very frustrating time where the cell signal was shit probably because the phone was under my thigh while I was driving
  • Next time we plan to have a designated phone holder in vehicle so that the reception doesn’t get cooked It helped to make sure there was a spare Verzion phone that was changing.

Radio Operators

• Everyone installed a race monitoring/pace app that streamed data from the transponder. It was useful to know your lap-times and pace since drivers will want to hit a given pace to know how hard they should be pushing their car.
• It’s important that the radio operator stays in a predictable spot. Most of the time we had the radio operator in pit so that if the driver said they’re coming back, the pit crew would know immediately. If they’re gonna go to the tower or somewhere else, the pit crew and radio operator must have good bidirection comms.

Wishlist

• Many teams recommended we have a pit board. A pit board would have been very useful for communicating when radios were busted.

Misc

Make sure everyone has discord installed and notifications on. Test people’s notifications and @mentions.

Drivers Ed

• Make sure all drivers know where the penalty board is. Not all of our drivers knew.
• Driving for an extended time in the dirt with two wheels off will throw a big plume. You should probably come in to the pits anyway.
• Make sure Drivers learn your corner numbers and names of corners. It is useful so that Drivers can give tips for the next Driver about braking points etc.

Things we wish we knew

• There is a victory lap at the end of the race. Don’t pit unless the car is mega cooked. Low gas indicator does not mean the car is out of gas completely. The worst that can happen is that you stop on track? Oh well we’ll get towed in.
• Some tracks (atleast Thunderhill) have a tire (mounter?) on site, so order more than 4 tires so you can swap to spares.

Running Smooth Pits

God Send Tools

• 12V powered air compressor. Amazing for pumping tires up to pressure at the pit.
• Hella extra headlamps for random pit crew members, especially during the night shift
• A massive roll of gorrila tape / zip-ties. We had an entire headlight “fall out” during test day, taped it right back into place.

We over indexed on:

• Tire wear
  • We were afraid of over using our tires since we only had one set. In retrospect, we could have pushed harder.
• We did too many pit stops, we should e trying to do much longer stints.
• We did a lot of tire pressure checking. And we were not consistent about checking right as we pitted or after the car had been sitting for a while.
  • So we spent a lot of time over inflating and under inflating, etc.

Things we could index on next time:

• Try to time your pit stops for when the yellow flags are out for flag station shift changes.
  • Sure yeah there’s the competitive edge here since you lose less time/laps
  • But honestly mostly because it’s just really boring for the drivers. And we want happy drivers.

Scheduling

We created a simple spreadsheet on the fly of who will be doing what roles so that when people came in to a pit we knew what roles were or were not being done.

We never rigorously did check-listing, and this was somewhat dangerous. Let’s make sure we have good check-listing for next race.

Spectators

Things we could have done better

• One of the most fun things you can do as a spectator is to ask other teams about their race day and car
  • Have teammates take spectators around to talk to other teams and judges!

Photos

The types of photos we wish we had more of:

• Drivers after they get out and are telling the pit crew about their experience
• Pit crew operators doing pit crew things, these look really badass and are very dynamic and interesting
  • Especially if they’re helping the driver do something!