Britcar Race report

[Thorney]

We did a detailed report on our first entry, details are here:

http://www.thorneymotorsport.co.uk/racing/Britcar_...

And a few piccies, I'm very proud of this little car

[thunderbelmont]

A nice little car.

It presses a few correct buttons with me : It's a Vauxhall, and it's No.59.

The only thing wrong with it - other than the fact that I wasn't driving it, was the onboard streaming video never appeared to work.

Well done guys.

[Jemco Andy]

The on board streaming was perfect (at the circuit). We had it on one of our TV screens on the pitwall throughout the night - very useful to keep track of what was going on out on the track.

Well done John.

[Thorney]

The TV did work a treat I must say, the commentators had it on in the booth and half the teams were using it if only to keep themselves amused, the crowd we had round our garage belied our modest status in the race itself.

The web streaming we simply got a bit wrong, the moment the race started we had over 100,000 site requests to view it and the pipe we had arranged simply couldnt cope. Later on in the evening the system recovered and we got a load of emails from people wathcing in France, Italy and the US saying how much they enjoyed it.

The 24hr was partly a proof of concept and we learnt a few things, firstly we've resolved the bandwidth issue so web feeds wont be a problem for next time (its an easy fix, just needed a better web partner, we can now handle 250,000 simultaneous requests) and we've resolved the sound issue so we can now feed both intercom traffic and ambient noise into the feed as well now.

We'll have a standa t Autosport next year to show it all off to teams and series organisers.

[sirtyro]

Thorny my wife commented on how big your rear defusser was! She was very impressed

[fastfreddy]

Couldn't get the streaming from the Thorney car apart from a few seconds here and there. Can't see the point in advertising you have live streaming if you don't have the bandwidth to cope with a few connections at a time.

I did watch several hours of live streaming from RapidTV though and that worked very well with live in car cameras in at least 2 cars and a pitlane camera. Very good quality coverage which just needed a better commentary and a few more camera angles to turn it into something really special.

They're now showing a few clips from what looks like the Honda on their site:

http://www.rapidmediasystems.com/rapidtv/

I think they've been offering this sort of service for a while now, so it's nothing new. The more teams who go for this way of getting race coverage to the masses, the better it will be for the fans. If we can't get spectators to come along to the circuit we should be trying to build up numbers from webcasts and getting sponsors involved on the back of it. Much easier than trying to get it on TV where you have higher production costs and advertising restrictions.

[Thorney]

Quite agree. The webcast thing was actually outside of our control but was a shame all the same. The actual coverage and picture from the cars was fantastic and with 100% coverage with no signal drop out we were delighted.

[Ockside]

The VX220 looked amazing and very professional. Hope to see you back next year but not just for the 24 hours!