St Pete

No race notes on the IndyCar season opener at St Petersburg from me tonight as I couldn’t watch the race – though I certainly tried.

Since IndyCar.com unlocked the Race Control service and made it free for this year I thought I would give it a go, unfortunately it didn’t want to work. No audio at any point, and the ‘video’ was more of a slideshow with a few frames running every 3 or 4 seconds. This caused a massive delay so I saw the race start some 15 minutes into the race (according to live timing).

Obviously I was very pissed off at the time because I’d been looking forward to it for a while. I somehow didn’t open the blog window but those following along on Twitter might have noticed my frustrations…

Thankfully it seems IndyCar know of the issues and are working on them:

“If you are watching Race Control…SORRY!!! Good news is that it got better, bad news is that there are a TON of things to do.” – IndyCarNation on Twitter

I think the only reason it will have got better is because of the reduced demand as people gave up. I hope they get it fixed for Long Beach.

Unfortunately I do not have Sky Sports so was unable to watch through ‘conventional’ means, and the other ‘unconventional’ means if you get my meaning were freezing and died just moments before the race started.

So I’m resorting to the back-up method, the method I’ve used for the last two years to watch IndyCar. Hopefully I’ll be able to use the official resources in future because racing series should know these other methods only exist out of sheer frustration.

I’m not sure I’ll be able to watch Long Beach live because it is a West Coast race and those are killers for Europeans – I don’t mind 2am on a Saturday night / Sunday morning, but not on a Sunday night.

4 thoughts on “St Pete”

  1. I feel your pain my friend. Honestly I do. As crappy as the sound was, at least I had a large screen with great picture quality to watch the race. I have already secured a seat in front of the giant tv at the home of a friend for Long Beach. (I of course am buying the beer and possibly cooking dinner for them afterward! LOL!) It’s amazing the deals you’ll make the drunker and angrier you get!

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  2. There are always other sources but it’s a shame we have to resort to them. Ironically it would have been my first live IndyCar race since Indy 2007. This was my attempt to ‘go legit’.I was quite looking forward to following along on Twitter etc..

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  3. It’s a shame. They pump up this online access stuff and it always-always-always-always gets overwhelmed and doesn’t work, especially for first race of the year or the Indy 500 or other high-demand situations. I PAID for Race Director last year and it worked twice for me (and those times it locked up now and then). I guess they either 1) can’t anticipate demand, which is hard to believe since each year demand swamps it or 2) it’s not cost effective to get the giant, steroidal bandwidth to accommodate it.

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  4. If it didn’t work when you had to pay for it, why did they make it free? They must have guessed at the masses of extra people that would generate?

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