NASCAR on Friday announced a new partnership with The Weather Company that will see the company named the official weather partner of the sanctioning body. Financial terms were not revealed for the multiyear deal, which will see The Weather Company and Flagship Solutions Group make an advanced weather insights dashboard. NASCAR will use the cloud-based system at its race control area at tracks to help make decisions about weather that could impact on-track action. NASCAR will start testing the dashboard over some of the final races of the ’17 season before fully rolling it out in ’18. The weather category is a newly created designation from NASCAR, which now has 59 official sponsors. NASCAR Managing Dir of Technology Development Betsy Grider said that among the most alluring features of IBM-owned Weather Co.’s offering is hyper-local data that can share reports from different areas of NASCAR’s sprawling facilities. She said, “They are forecasting for more than 2 billion locations around the world every 15 minutes -- and with what they can do in hyper local weather, it suddenly became a lot more interesting." She added it is something NASCAR has "always been focused on in tracking the radar, but this just takes it to the next level as weather technology has evolved.” Grider said it is possible that consumer-facing assets could be added at some point to the deal but that the deal is starting with the racing operations focus.
