Serious-Racing one year anniversary

In November of 2012, I went to Almeria, in Spain for a four day track holiday. It was an eventful week for a lot of reasons (first time on track with my new bike and more rain than there should be in Spain’s driest area), but it was mostly eventful because it was the first time I tried out RaceChrono.

My friend Tony had suggested we give it a try, and it instantly appealed to my technical side. We were both blown away by the data available to us through RaceChrono – being able to see your speed at any point on the track was a revelation. 12 months before I’d gladly paid £10 for just the lap times from another trip to Almeria, and now with a free Android app we were getting full GPS lap times.

But the thing we found ourselves doing the most with this data, was comparing with each other. We’d hold our phones side by side and look at fastest points on the straights and slowest points on the corners. We learned a lot about our different riding techniques from this, and I’m sorry to say we learned that Tony was actually quicker through the corners on his GSX-R 750 than I was on my RSV4, and it was only because I was obviously faster on the straights that I had a faster lap time than him.

We didn’t have a very good Internet connection out there in Spain, but we naturally thought “wouldn’t it be great to be able to compare these on a big screen when we get home?” However, after quite a lot of searching once we were back in the UK, I wasn’t able to find a website that did this. So I had a thought. And that thought is what eventually became Serious-Racing.com.

Fast forward to July 23rd 2013, and the site is now up and running, but in closed beta. Up until this point, it’s just been myself and my trackday friends that have been testing the site. It’s time to see what the wider world thinks of it. I placed a post on the Trackday Riders forum calling out for beta testers, and got an overwhelming response. The guys were fantastically patient, enthusiastic, and helpful in bringing the site along, and getting us to the stage of being able to open the site up for public use, with support for not just RaceChrono, but AIM, QStarz and Harry’s Laptimer as well.

On September 8th the site was opened up for anyone to sign up, and since then we’ve grown to have users from 19 countries and we now have 6.5k laps in the system.

So what’s next? We’re really excited about where the site goes from here. We have big plans for how we can make Serious-Racing more involving, more useful and more fun. We hope you’ll stick with us to find out how far we can go, and bring some more friends along for the ride.