Cars are seen parked on pit road due to weather during the NASCAR XFINITY Series Coca-Cola Firecracker 250 at Daytona International Speedway on July 1, 2017. (Photo by Jared C. Tilton/Getty Images)
Daytona International Speedway is a massive complex with 480 acres of a race track, sprawling lake-bearing infield and capacity for more than 100,000 roaring fans. The front stretch alone extends nearly a mile long in this coastal Florida town with a notoriously fickle weather pattern. That’s one of many difficulties meteorologists face in forecasting weather for races such as the site’s signature Daytona 500.
To address difficulties with hyper-local projections, NASCAR is entering into a unique partnership with The Weather Company — the IBM-owned parent company of The Weather Channel. The Weather Company makes forecasts for 2.2 billion locations across the globe every 15 minutes with half-kilometer resolution.
“What’s happening at one turn may be different than what’s happening at another turn, so the specificity was important to us,” Betsy Grider, NASCAR’s managing director of technology development, said.
The wide-ranging collaboration may eventually include such macro implementations as the use of historical weather data and climate patterns to rearrange the race calendar into a more optimal schedule. For now, it will start with The Weather Company building a dashboard (dubbed The Weather Track) that NASCAR can use in race control for operational decisions.
“That’s going to give us a lot of critical weather information, so looking at things like rain start times, rain stop times, wind speed, lightning proximity, tornado and flash flood warnings and other pieces of weather information that will really help our race organizers to optimize those race conditions and start looking at things like how it impacts driver performance,” Grider said.
After all, NASCAR sanctions 1,200 races per year from Michigan to Florida and New Hampshire to Southern California — “a myriad of conditions and climates,” said Michelle Boockoff-Bajdek, the head of marketing for The Weather Company’s Global Business Solutions group.
“Sometimes when people think about weather, they think about the severe — the bigger storms that tend to occur — but, in fact, it’s the small changes in the weather that, I think, matter most here,” Boockoff-Bajdek added.
She noted that weather “affects absolutely every sector of the economy” with NASCAR’s business especially weather-dependent. The forecast for Sunday’s Monster Cup race in Charlotte is rainy, with fans bracing for delays. With IBM’s computational might and the Flagship Solution Group’s Infralytics (a combination of infrastructure and analytics tech), The Weather Company draws not only on radar and satellite for data collection but also 50,000 daily commercial flights, 250,000 personal weather stations, 9 million webcam uploads, 2 million crowd reports and 50 million IoT barometric reports.
The Weather Company takes that mountain of information — 400 terabytes are generated per day — and also combines the best 162 forecast models using dynamic machine learning to make a forecast that is “specific to where you are and when you are,” Boockoff-Bajdek said, adding: “We’re bringing all this data to bear so we can deliver the most accurate, precise forecast and one that has elasticity built into it.”
The process is not fully automated, however, and The Weather Company will make a staff of meteorologists available for regular briefings in advance of and during race weekends.
Grider noted that “how air temperature impacts downforce” and “how track temperature impacts tire falloff” are among the speed-affecting conditions for drivers. She said that, once NASCAR has optimized the data for race ops and fan engagement, they will look into re-purposing some of the information to make it accessible and outward facing for fans. Boockoff-Bajdek noted the potential for shared educational content as well.
“We’re excited to get started,” Grider said, “trying to figure out all the different tentacles where it can grow and how it can impact the business.”
At Charlotte Motor Speedway in Concord, NC, on Oct. 6, 2017L (L to R) Mark Wyllie, CEO of Flagship Solutions Group; Ben Kennedy, NASCAR XFINITY Series driver; Michelle Boockoff-Bajdek, Global Business Solutions at The Weather Company; Betsy Grider, Managing Director of Technology Development, NASCAR (Credit: Matthew T. Thacker / Nigel Kinrade Photography)
