Anderstorp

This weekend it is time for the first competition in the Swedish championships for 2006. It is held at the old F1 track Anderstorp. I will go there this evening with my biggest investment for this season: a 3 metre long (short?) caravan! It acts as a bike transporter too since it has wide doors at the back.
My goal is to reach laptimes below 1.53 and place myself in the top five, maybe top three too with a little luck. So please whish me some!

The new compare session look gives a much better overview, here is a screen shot:

Alice and me

P1040035
Originally uploaded by Torkel.

This weekend I finally got to meet Alice, earlier travel plans had been canceled due to me not feeling very well. Here is pic of me and a 3 weeks old Alice, she is completely irresistable! :)

I also spent 4 days at Brno and had a great time, what a fantastic race track! I managed to get my Aprilia RS250 down to 2.29.8 which I am quite pleased with but for next year the goal is 2.25 (if I race the same bike that is).

Tracktimer development continues as usual. I am now in the process of redesigning the "Compare sessions" look and I will also add some session note fields for detonation counters, very useful for GP 2-strokes.

Uncle Torkel

Jippie!
Today my sister Anna got her first baby, a little Alice! I will go to Stockholm this weekend to have a look at her. It's quite unreal! :)
(The picture shows the "original" Alice: my very much loved grandmother. The guy with the nice smelling foot is me...)

Plans for v4.0

I just added import functionality from Motec exported files. So expect a new official release in about a week.

Then it's time to start working on v4.0...
My focus will now be on endurance racing in close cooperation with a swedish team that finished in second place in last years swedish endurance series.

There are three things that are of special interest:

• Planning tool for the whole race with possibility to get new suggestions during the race
  This tool (or guru as I will probably call it :)) will take many things into consideration, for instance estimated lap times and fuel consumption rates for each driver in different conditions (day/night/wet/dry)


• Live reading of lap times
  There is no way anyone can sit and press a button for 8 hours so this is crucial.


• Possibility to have subsessions for a session
  During an endurance race you switch driver, tires, brakes, oil, suspension setup, just about everything! As of right now a session in Tracktimer is based on just one setup and one driver. In the future a session shall be able to hold any number of subsessions with more or less setup changes in each. This will also work well for normal practice when you take a short pitstop and change some detail but still don't want to call it a new session just because of that small change.
  When comparing sessions later I know there will be some complications but nothing that cannot be solved.

But my first priority is to get myself and my bike ready for a trip to Brno this easter for 4 days of roadracing practice. Yes, I am looking forward to that! Biaggis favourite track if I remember correctly.

I got mail

Maybe not mail, more like a a box from cafepress.com with my T-shirt and two mugs! This turned out to be by far the most expensive T-shirt and mug I have ever bought... Base price for everything was $38. I can live with that, no problem. Then it was shipping to Sweden from USA, $15. And then the swedish customs added tax and toll to make it an extra 155 SEK or $20. So this T-shirt and two mugs cost me $73...
Bottom line, don't buy this if you don't live in USA!

The quality was good except for the small print on the frontside of the T-shirt, some bleeding colors there, a bit annoying...
Anyway, I now have proper mugs for coffe drinking in the pits this season, not too bad!

As for Tracktimer development I have released v3.0.0.53 to a chosen few testers. It has some small cosmetic fixes and also the opportunity to enter files and web sites in notes and get a clickable hyperlink. Good for linking to data either on you hard drive or on the internet.

Merchandise

I feel like a lemming right now, doing the same as everybody else. Opening a "free" shop at cafepress that is!



(I just ordered two mugs and a T-shirt for myself just to see if they are any good, a report will come!)

Programmingwise I am trying to understand RTF (Rich Text Format) for Tracktimer memos right now. The goal is to be able to enter a filename or an URL and get an automatic hyperlink. Not quite there yet though...

I have also released a new beta release called v3.0.0.52 based on the new Delphi 2006! It looks very good (graphically nicer than before too) so far so I will probably soon replace the current official release v3.0.0.50 with this one.
It has a few improvements too such as track copying, track surface type and possibility to search in part status groups.

Forum Tracktimeranum

If only the old romans knew how many people should be talking about forums in the future!
Yes, there is now a forum at www.tracktimer.com/forum , it is not pretty and it is very empty but it exists and is free to use for anyone that is interested.
Welcome!

Merry Christmas!

Ho ho ho!

It's this time of the year again, my own private Swedish Rally starts!

Tomorrow at the break of dawn the first stint goes to Stockholm. I have arranged so the E4 will be free from all other traffic so I can cut the corners as I wish and try to better my personal record. The winner (me of course) will receive something we in Sweden call "julskinka", "glögg" and "sill". After a few days that mainly consists of moving large amounts of white cold stuff from one place to another I will let my back rest for a few days.

Instead I will act as co-driver (mostly watching videos and eating junk food) on the newly developed all-carbon Y-buss - all the way to the arctic test tracks in Härnösand. There I will most probably dive deep into even more "julskinka", "glögg" and "sill".

Then on Thursday I do it all again but backwards.

This is what we in Sweden call vacation. If it wasn't for "julskinka", "glögg" and "sill" I would call it something else...

I wish all of you a Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year!

Happy racing (as always!)

/Torkel

New Track Packs added

A total of 10 tracks in South Africa and 16 tracks in Great Britain, Ireland and Wales can now be imported into Tracktimer. My regards to Andy Jamison who sent me this data.
The track packs are found in the Download section. Just download, extract the files and follow the instructions in the readme.txt file to import them.

Possible to download backup data for demo

I finally did something I have thought about doing for - let me see now... - some years! For those of you that have downloaded the demo and haven't bought a license there isn't really much to see and play with. But if you download the newly added backup (actually part of my personal data from 2004-2005) you can play around with the program a lot more, you cannot save anything though.

All data are in Swedish unfortunately, hopefully it will be usable anyway. It is also based on the motorcycle version which means that you have to choose motorcycle as vehicle to be able to open the sessions and the tire list.
If you are a registered user there is of course no need to download this. If you do anyway remember to take a backup of your own data first.

The backup file can be found in the download section, together with instructions on how to use it, enjoy!

The next step for Tracktimer "developmentwise" is to port it to Delphi 2005 from Delphi 6, I am almost there but not quite yet.