Introducing Paddock-Pal! – Your Track-Side Assistant.
Paddock Pal is developed and maintained by the friendly folks at Gran Touring Motorsports (GTM), and was originally designed by merging our Racer’s Wiki and our Travel Travel Guide into a new mobile-friendly site for folks to use while on track. Paddock Pal is a site and not an app, so that anyone can access it at any time, with nothing to download and no compatibility issues. We’ve designed (and tested) it to run on the smallest screen still available – the iPhone6.
Since many of us are coaches, we then began to incorporate additional information that helped us augment the classroom and was an easy way for 1st timers and students to have all sorts of helpful reference material all in one place.
Inside Paddock Pal you’ll find information divided up by Venue (aka “Track Guide” – Tracks, Drag Strips, Road Rallies, Offroad Parks – anything with a Paddock!)
Information ranges from:
- Venue data with pictures of the campus, amenities, camping information, where to find fuel, food, lodging and more through our mapping tool.
- Turn-by-Turn instructions provided by track experts and sponsors with Track Maps, Passing Zones and 1-lap video information and more.
- Real on-site conditions and weather information provided by NOAA
- Next-up track event dates powered by HPDEjunkie.com
- A community feedback section where drivers, participants, guests can score the venue.
Paddock Pal also includes safety information and helpful reminders, articles and even Break/Fix Podcast episodes relevant to motorsports like:
- Appropriate Passing Signals, Learning the Flags, Track Insurance
- 1st timer information like: what to bring to an event?, “things I wish I knew as a noob”, Health and Hydration information, and more!
Paddock Pal was also expanded to help organizers by including a “digital schedule” of your event weekend. We take your paper (and email) based data and convert it into an “event” in Paddock Pal which drivers, guest, participants, staff, etc. can use to stay on time and never lose that “sheet of paper” – Our scheduler has different ways that folks can view and even download the weekend information while incorporating specifics about your event along with it. We include a “staff directory” with headshots and information about the facilitators to help folks identify who to come to with questions or issues, along with any pre-event/event information you would normally send out to folks days before an event.
Paddock Pal is a free service, provided by GTM and we’d love to host your weekend data! All we require is:
- Date/Time/Location of the Event
- A copy of your weekend schedule and any details about the run groups
- Headshots, titles and contact info for your staff
- And any additional event information you’d like to include, and we’ll take care of the rest!
In the future we may open up a self-service portal for organizers to upload the data themselves, but we realize that you’re already busy enough with everything going on, and so we’re volunteering to take any additional burden that learning a new system might impose off your plate.
Contact us at grid@paddock-pal.com.
If you’re not sure you’re ready for Paddock Pal, we understand. If you’re excited about the prospect, let us know – we can easily set up a demo or you can look at active or past events (about>archive) by visiting www.paddock-pal.com and get a feel for how Paddock Pal is capable of enhancing your events.
Thanks for considering Paddock Pal!