SMT Supplies Data, Graphics for Superstar Racing Experience

On June 12, motorsports ushered in a throwback racing series with the debut of the Superstar Racing Experience (SRX), a series of six Saturday night stock car races on short tracks that pits rising stars against retired champions — with SMT behind the technology wheel.

Because many of the tracks don’t have fiber or other connectivity to transport signals to remote production teams, the shows require on-site production teams. Working from SMT’s brand-new production van, SMT’s team provides data services and graphics for the live broadcast.

SMT modified 16 cars (12 identical stock cars plus four backups) with GPS vectors, similar to the setup for NASCAR races. With the vectors, SMT can track the position of each car, and calculate speed, throttle and brakes, laps led and rank. The data is sent to the production van, where SMT’s technical team produces graphics for broadcast, including dynamic leaderboards, virtual ads on start/restart/finish, and 3D pointers.

SMT introduced a new heart rate graphic for the July 3 Independence Showdown race, with 6 drivers/cars outfitted with hardware and software to integrate WHOOP BPM data into graphics. For the July 10 race in Slinger, a total of 8 cars/drivers transmitted the data, and the entire field was outfitted for the Nashville championship race.

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