The Four Way Confusion Behind the "Rally Timing System"

The biggest underlying element that leads to confusion with this topic is that in rally when one person says "timing system" no one else has any idea what they are talking about. Here are the possibilities:

• "Timing system" - "I'm talking about which method of calculating due times at the next control are we using. FIA? Modified FIA? SCCA? NORRA?"
• "Timing system" - "I'm talking about which software are we using to tabulate scores and print results."
• "Timing system" - "I'm talking about what hardware are we using to measure when a car or motorcycle crosses the finish line."

All of these, unfortunately for clarity, are valid expressions. And the confusion often gets even deeper when people decide that they're going to "fix the timing system", generally after an event where the scores take a long time to finalize. So let's create some terms to define what these pieces actually are, so that we can then talk about them individually.

1. Due Time Calculation Method - This is how codrivers mathematically come up with the answer to the question "When should we check in to the next control?"
2. Finish Line Crossing Detection System - This is how the moment the race vehicle crosses the finish line is detected.
3. Data Transfer System - The numbers that are the time of day, or the stage time, this is how they get from out in the woods to back to where someone can do something with them.
4. Scoring Software - This is how all the data is tabulated into a calculation of who won.

The amazing part is that each of these systems is independent, that is, while they must all exist, the various incarnations of each can be mixed with the others to form a pretty large number of possible outcomes. Let's look at each in detail.

Due Time Calculation Method
There are three variants on this that you'll generally encounter:

1. Modified FIA - The time you are due at the next stage is the time of day that you started this stage, plus the allowed time for the stage, plus the allowed time for the transit. Worldwide, sometimes referenced as A-B. This is what NASA Rally Sport uses.
2. FIA - The time you are due at the next stage is the time of day that you started this stage, plus the allowed time for stage and transit (which is combined into one number). Worldwide, sometimes referenced as A-A. The WRC uses this.
3. SCCA - The time you are due at the next stage is the time of day that you finished this stage, plus the allowed time for the transit. This method isn't used worldwide, so if you see A-A or A-B they're not talking about this.

And each of those has a few tweaks, but that's the broad strokes. Everything here is rules, there's no technology specified, forms specified, or computers involved. And even for the volunteers at each station recording the times, their task remains the same under all conditions: record the time the racer arrived at the control.

Finish Line Crossing Detection System
There are multiple ways to detect how a rally car crosses the finish line. One way is a stopwatch (or any variation of a human pressing a button on a clock of some sort). Closely related is a "remote stopwatch" which is a common setup where someone with a radio at the finish line will transmit "Car coming... ready... ready... MARK!" at which point the person with the actual stopwatch down at the finish control presses the button. Other technological possibilities exist: an air hose across the road, a variety of light beams across the road, and radio methods such as either an AMB transponder (common at race tracks) or an active RFID chip.

More generally, we could classify this not as "Finish Line Crossing Detection System" but as "Line Crossing Detection System", since we need to record not only the finishes, but the starts, and the arrivals, and services and rally starts and final controls. Almost always a rally will be taking data from multiple different types of hardware throughout the event, as each time control has different degrees of timing resolution required. For example, while we might time the finish of a stage to the exact second or tenth of a second, arriving at a service is timed only to the minute. So you might have a light beam at a superspecial stage, a remote stopwatch at the stage, an atomic clock at a service, and a wristwatch at a regrouping control. To make things even more difficult and complicated, the contrast in physics behind each of these detection scenarios (one high speed, the other nearly stationary) means that a uniform method of automatic detection is somewhere between impractical and impossible.

Data Transfer System
Remember to consider "data" in the most abstract of its forms, just as "information". Don't think of "data" as electrical ones and zeros. As we've seen above, the data might, or might not, exist electronically at any given point. There is one universal Data Transfer System in rally, and that is the trusty old paper time card, with handwritten information on it. Every race vehicle has one, and ultimately it transports their timing data back to the organizers from the field. Overall, this system has high (but not absolute) reliability, but it's not very quick.

The log sheets kept by the controls are another Data Transfer System. Sometimes they are brought back by sweep, and sometimes by a specialized scoring gatherer, or sometimes by the stage captain at the end of the day, this is another physical method of moving the information back.

A radio link with people verbally reading the times is used in some parts of the country as well. This is two meter HAM radio, with a second set of volunteers whose only task is to transfer data back to a central location where it can be logged. A similar method is using cell phones to call volunteers and read the logs for data entry. A twist on that is taking a picture of the log sheet with a smart phone, and texting that picture to a person who can input the data into the scoring system. Unknown to many racers, at some NASA Rally Sport events we use a distributed computing model, where scoring volunteers are telecommuting from across the country. So your finish time gets recorded in the deep woods of New York state, read via phone call to a person in South Carolina, where it is then entered into a computer server based in California, which is then viewed back at the scoring headquarters in New York. Again, this is just another method of moving the data from the stages back to the rally headquarters. The latest technology NRS for data transfer is Android tablets in the field with a mobile 3G WiFi hotspot being carried by the sweep vehicle. Each tablet (re-purposed Barnes and Noble "Nook" readers) then connects to the internet and uploads its logs to the server.

Beyond these methods, which are all in use in the United States, we can look at a couple examples of more digital methods. In Barbados, for example, a scoring team drives around behind the sweep vehicles and plugs their laptop into each clock, and there is a clock at every control that has the time and vehicle number recorded. The scoring team then emails the log from each clock to the scoring headquarters. For the WRC, there's a plane flying in circles above the rally all day long. The plane has a variety of radio and cell phone repeaters, and the times are beamed up to the plane and back down to scoring headquarters in that way.

Scoring Software
Finally the numbers from the field have made it back to scoring headquarters, and now it's time to crunch those numbers figure out who won. A variety of systems exist and are in use in North America currently. Believe it or not, there are events that still use paper (or some other variety of writing them by hand) as their "software". The math is done manually, and a number '1' is written by the person with the lowest time. Becoming less common now, an Excel spreadsheet is occasionally used. There are several systems which run the calculations on a local laptop with a computer program designed for scoring, these systems then later upload results files to the internet. NASA Rally Sport has the only fully cloud-based scoring software, which uses an online database where data is entered directly online, and the results files are generated remotely. (Interestingly, the NRS scoring system can also serve as the Data Transfer System layer when proper cell coverage is available.)

Summary
What is interesting is that "the scoring system" must be assembled from all of these pieces. Each subsystem is very independent, so they're like Legos, or Subaru engines, they are mixed and matched until you find a combination that works for your particular event. Doing some math with some of the different possible options, there are 3x8x8x8 = 1536 different possible combinations that one could be possibly talking about when one says "the scoring system" in North America, and that's not the maximum. Now we know why this is so much confusion when people talk about "the timing system".