Global effort to rectify Supercars timing trouble

Qualifying on Saturday at Taupo International Motorsport Park and Sunday at Symmons Plains were impacted by unrelated issues with the timing system.

The Taupo trouble was a software bug that meant Q1 times were not wiped from the board ahead of Q2, causing widespread confusion among teams and race control.

While that was rectified during the Taupo weekend, far worse followed at Symmons Plains when a hardware failure delayed Sunday’s Q2 session by more than 30 minutes.

Supercars motorsport boss Tim Edwards told Speedcafe there’s been a major effort since Symmons Plains to ensure there’s no repeat in Perth.

“[What happened at Symmons Plains] was totally unrelated to what happened in New Zealand,” he said.

“This was a catastrophic failure of a brand-new electronic part. It’s gone back to the supplier in the Netherlands and they’re trying to ascertain why it failed.

“But we’re very comfortable with the plans we’ve got in place for Perth that we’ve got enough redundancy should we have the same thing fail.”

The part in question is understood to have been the power supply for the control box at the main timing line.

Decoder boxes are placed by Supercars at each timing line around the circuit, taking the timing information and transmitting it to race control via fibre optic cable.

While still using Natsoft timing software, Supercars this year upgraded from the long-used Dorian timing hardware to that of Netherlands-based Mylaps.

Mylaps is used around the world and has been working closely with Supercars in the wake of the Symmons Plains scenario.

Speedcafe also heard that timing cables had been invertedly kicked out on Sunday morning at Symmons Plains, although Edwards clarified this was not a major issue.

“That happened earlier [before the main failure], and it’s happened consistently over the years, you always have a timing line go down somewhere,” he said.

“It means teams might not have a certain microsector, but you don’t stress about that because it doesn’t impact what’s required from a race control point of view.

“Unfortunately, while they were out fixing that, just plugging it in, was when we had the catastrophic failure on the startline.”

The switch from Dorian to Mylaps is requiring Supercars to cut new timing lines into many tracks around the country ahead of their events.

Supercars is also installing a timing loop at the pit exit of each track as part of efforts to crack down on drivers flicking their pit speed limiter off early.