A day at Sonoma Raceway

Race car driving may seem like a sport for the experts, mechanically-inclined men (and yes, a few women) who go for noise and speed and the danger of competition. But it’s also a spectator sport whose appeal goes beyond all that, with close-up views of the competitors and their crews at work in surprisingly intimate action.

At Sonoma Raceway, as at other Speedway Motorsports group of tracks, the customer experience is cultivated in many ways. The main grandstands overlook the Pit, where the drivers bring their cars in for blazingly-fast service between laps, and the garages are located just south of the grandstands where teams of mechanics in impossibly-clean matching overalls work on racecars with impossibly-clean engines.

It’s not just a visual bonus – ticket-holders can get upgrades that allow access to the Pit, and the Garages, and pre-race events including autograph signings with the drivers of the current race as well as racing legends. These features make IndyCar racing more a participatory sport than you might imagine – and it reaches its climax with the IndyCar Experience, a single lap around the 2.385-mile track in a two-seat race car, driven by an IndyCar pro.

Increasingly, you don’t even have to go to the track to immerse yourself in the action. The Verizon IndyCar series is, obviously, sponsored by mobile phone network giant Verizon. Broadcast Sports International, IMS Productions and others huddle in a system of mobile production trucks packed with cables, switchers, editing hardware and engineers, assembling a plethora of information – called “telemetrics” in the trade – from the race cars, their pits, and the drivers themselves.

Mark Walleman of IMS Productions said the entire crew of 120 goes to all of the major racing event in the series, from March to September, where it takes from two to five days to set up the six production trucks and hook them into miles of data cables leading to a system of microphones and cameras, including 12 “hard” cameras set up at key points on the track, three pit cameras, two on jibs, five rob-cams – and two or three cameras on select race cars. Many of the cameras are wireless, on radio frequency (RF) bands that transmit to the trucks or to relay stations set up around the track.

The race car cameras have to be sponsored, like so much else in this sport, so the more successful teams are more likely to have on-car cameras, mounted behind the driver with a view to the front at the advancing track, or in front of the driver with a view of the guy behind the wheel. Some have cameras mounted on the aerodynamic wings the cars have to maximize speed, with a view of the big tires squealing around the track.

It’s all parsed by a team of over 100 technicians into information packets delivered to the networks (NBC Sports on TV, Sirius/XM on subscription radio) and special features for local stations across the 8-track network.

But since it is the branded Verizon IndyCar series (in an infamously heavily-branded sport), cell phone users are not overlooked. At the end of the chain of cables and switchboards, Christopher Schulp sits in front of a couple monitors and a switch box, where he gives the final massage to the data stream that’s sent to the app: the Verizon IndyCar series app, available for iPhone and Android, and for all cell phone users though at its most robust for Verizon subscribers.

App users have access to almost all the ridiculously large amount data collected by the miles of cables, wireless transmitters and background data, and can punch onto a car during the course of a race with the click of a fingertip to view not only such banal data as what position in the race the car holds, but MPH and RPM, what gear the driver is in, what degree off dead-center the steering wheel is turned, the percentage of throttle or braking being applied, lap times and, of course, who made then engine and the tires of the car.

And there’s a squiggly line representing the track itself, with a series of numbers crawling around the course like racing ants, representing the race-in-progress. (Watching the IndyCar final on Sunday with the Android app in hand revealed the surprising fact that the app is almost 10 seconds ahead of the broadcast signal: gamblers, take note.)

Still, as immersive as all this data is, it can’t compare to the real thing. The IndyCar Experience offers just that, a chance to ride around the track itself, suited up in a fire suit, gloves, headsock and helmet, with an IndyPro driver at the wheel in the front cockpit of the two-seater.

From the back seat, the term “exhilarating” and “terrifying” seem interchangeable. It’s as close to flying as you can get, at less than two feet above the track. From inside the helmet the noise of the car is somewhat muted, but only somewhat: the experience is of speeds up to 150 mph, a riotous din of up to 130 db, gravity forces of about 4 Gs around corners, and an Einsteinian sense of time: the swing around the 11-turn, 2-1/3 mile track measures just over a minute in real time, but the experience never seems to end.

This past weekend one of the drivers was the legendary Mario Andretti, no longer in competition but a guy you can’t keep off the track. Getting “Mario” (nobody seems to call him Mr. Andretti) to drive your Experience, however, isn’t free. It’s not even cheap: regular price for the Experience at Sonoma Raceway is just under $500 and, yes, there is a Mario surcharge.

Contact Christian at christian.kallen@sonomanews.com.