This year’s 24-hours of Nürburgring will go down in the history books for so many reasons. While others choose to fix their gaze on the negatives surrounding the 2015 race (speed limits and tougher qualification rules resulting in a 25% drop in entries), I want to look at the positives.
10% DISCOUNT: "BTGBLOG"
“It’s all about the fans,” enthuses Adam Osieka. “They come first, everything else second. And for them, I think it was a great race.”
It’s a refreshing and welcome change to the moaning I’ve been listening to for the last few weeks. Sure, Adam was never going to whinge; it would be against his interests as both GetSpeed and Nürburgring boss.
“I’m happy with our result considering that other teams were using true 4.0litre GT3Rs while we just bolted arches to our 3.8 Cup car”, confirmed Adam. “But really this race was about bringing more to the fans.”
And, there, I would agree with him 100%. This year the audiences at home enjoyed some major improvements over last year’s event, mostly thanks to the Vodafone tie-up, improvements at Wige and Getspeed’s onboards and Stress Level monitoring.
“Have you seen NASCAR?,” Adam asks. And while I think going around only left-handers would be dull, I have to agree that the Americans have really got the multi-camera, live-feed, every-background-of-every-driver angle really sewn up.
For the first time ever, livestreams from selected cars were possible all night through the Vodafone 4G network. No circling helicopters needed to relay signals.
GetSpeed’s own Stress Level Monitoring technologies were fed into the same stream as the video, processed together and fed live to TENS of MILLIONS of viewers all around the globe.
“This year it was a few cars, next year it would be great to have at least 20 cars with this technology.”
Then consider the fantastic new live timing page that we and the public both had access to, via livetiming.tracktime.info
With statistics, laptimes and even tracking (powered by GPS Auge) all available through one webpage, even our lowly #underdog pit garage felt a little bit “F1”
And last, but not least, Darren Langeveld and Paul Cowland (aided by the dulcet tones of Martin Houston) took care of a very light-hearted English commentary over the Youtube-powered Vodafone feed. I was lucky enough to feature on this no fewer than three times over the course of the race.
(P.S. we raced it and finished too!)
