Anyway, race ranger seems like a nice tool for helping athletes police themselves. An official with a judgement call is still needed. //

To me this is the main reason for having this technology, it gives the athletes a pretty concrete notice of where they are riding, and where they should be. And of course most will use this to sit right on the line, they should. It is a race for money after all, so you need to be in position to take advantage or whatever is thrown at you by others. It will also not allow someone to willy nilly just slot in after a weak pass, and make folks hold position or truly commit to going to the front. Right there eliminates 70% of the confusion and drafting dynamic in a group of riders.

And yes it would be nice to have some officials also using this to make their calls, takes the gray area out of their I think this is a violation. It can only be a good thing going forward, just hope the technology is accurate to a couple inches, otherwise it just becomes just guessing all over again...

The Race Ranger folks claim accuracy of 10cm which is ~ 4". I think this is plenty close enough for the intended purpose.

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Genetics load the gun, lifestyle pulls the trigger.

This system allows athletes to ride entirely legally (at whatever specified separation) with a measure of confidence, not having to rely on their estimate nor the estimate of an accompanying moto ref.
A moto ref who sees blue for any length of time is bound to focus on the athlete behind the blue light to determine further infraction (bit like the ITA value other athletes, coaches etc sending them confidential 'possible doper' tips). The difference is the blue signal is blazing in clear view of the (deliberate or inadvertent) wheel sucker.
It also helps with the moving right but not cutting in dilemma: both the rider in the train and the rider overtaking: both athletes can tell if the overtaking rider has entered the draft zone of the rider in front. If the overtaking rider can see a yellow ahead, they can overtake (wheel in front) and then expect the overtaken rider (iaw the rules) to back off. The overtaking rider has not entered the rider ahead's draft zone and can move right. This is not cutting in.
If the overtaking rider can see a red ahead, they can overtake (wheel in front); the overtaken rider (iaw the rules) has 25 seconds to back out of the draft zone, but won't need to because . . . .
the overtaking rider has to keep going and overtake the next athlete: they have (more or less) entered the rider ahead's draft zone and must complete that pass too. They cannot cut in without risking penalty.
This also means, further back, that an athlete can see a yellow light a couple or three up the train and start their multiple overtake in the hope that it's still there when they get there.
The moto refs can see these light signals and make judgements accordingly. Training of the moto refs will absolutely be critical: their judgements need to be made at speed and with only a few tens of seconds where the infraction occurs and will need to take into account road changes of direction (bends) and changes of gradient (especially descending to climbing).
But the moto refs' judgements/decisions will be aided by and not driven by the RR light signals. The idea of a ref looking at what the computer says based on (even perfect) RR data and penalising on that basis is barking.

I think the best way to utilize this technology is tell the athletes you get x number of seconds in the draft zone and when you exceed that you get penalized. This way you don’t ruin someone’s race for a momentary lapse of concentration.

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Let food be thy medicine...

Completely agree. Eveyone gets 60s per race in the zone total, and after that it's a 5min penalty or whatever. That should give you the turns/hills excuse if you're in a pack. If you're hanging out longer than that, too bad. They could even say if you're lower than 15km/hr time in draft zone doesn't count (assuming the device tracks speed). Worst case scenario, we see athletes riding very close on very slow climbs. Big deal, makes for more fun anyway.

My understanding is that all officials will have access to live RR data even if they don't have a visual of an infraction occuring.

So if there's an athlete who is consistently sitting in the blue light or flicking in and out of the zone race officials will be able to hop on their radios and send someone to bust that athlete or at the very least babysit them directly for a while.

The live tracking data and margin for error (10 cm as someone mentioned) is more than good enough to issue obvious penalties even if there wasn't a direct visual. Someone sitting in the blue light for 1 min + is going to get slapped. Most pros know better than to do so, but when this lands at the AG level in a few years it'll be common.

This is probably a dumb question but the way you put it kind of bring it to light: Are the distances and positions going to be logged, or do the lights just flash real time? Surely if the officials have access to the data then it will be logged centrally somewhere. It's going to be a nightmare tho trying to use it for AG races. 2,000 little bluetooth or cellular devices all reporting to the same system. Or is the system one that saves the data internally to be uploaded later?

It's hard to see the system being very effective without giving officials real-time access to the date remotely. If it's logged internally then basically every infraction has to be adjudicated afterward with no other context.

The data is transmitted real time but is also cached in the device in case there's a loss of communication with the central computer due to tunnels, forests, distance, etc. Mobile refs are supposed to be able to receive data real time at a minimum of 3k away in the worst of conditions up to and perhaps more than 10k away.

I feel that with age groupers one would almost certainly need to rely on the unit itself making calls as refs would be too overwhelmed to check on all infractions.

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Genetics load the gun, lifestyle pulls the trigger.

The on bike devices according to their website are a mixture of UWB, Bluetooth, GPS, and LoRa - so radio and bluetooth + GPS good from 3-10km front and back depending on the environment. No cellular modems. Everything is then logged in the cloud based app that the officials have which is connected to the internet. If the bike device loses connection with the nearest official, the data is saved and uploaded to the cloud when one gets close enough.

So any official in that 3-10km range is getting real-time data to their tablet for the athletes in their vicinity with everything they see also being logged to the cloud. From there, that nearby official is shown the worst offending athletes in their area. So if there's an athlete 1 mile up the road who is constantly hugging a wheel or playing the yo-yo game he/she is getting a motorbike coming their way to slap them on the wrist. The official will know how long they have been illegally drafting or how many times they yo-yo'd.

But if an athlete accidentally once enters the zone and then quickly leaves, they won't be very high on the priority list to recieve special attention. The official still makes the judgement call in any race - including the 2,000 person AG race that is busy.

I don't think the point is to check all infractions in AG races - when this thing gets rolled out to the masses most AG athletes will probably self-police themselves. Most people who pop into the zone will probably go "oh shit" and then immediately leave. Those athletes aren't the target for attention.

They want to get the ones who constantly sit or yo-yo in the zone - the officials system will report and rank the worst offenders first.

Good points.

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Genetics load the gun, lifestyle pulls the trigger.

This is great news for sure but Race Ranger needs to progress to make it actually a useful thing. The plan has been to have an app and have it easy for officials to see who has spent the most time in the draft zone etc. Like people have explained here, BUT right now all it is is lights on bikes. I'm hopeful that RR will progress to have more data. I'd love to see published data after each race of how much time people spent in draft zones etc. I'd also love to see it used with motos on course, which I think is a much bigger issue in the pro field then drafting is right now.

I would rephrase @Lurker4's second sentence: a ref on the ground (moto) to make a judgement call is still needed. RR offers excellent prima facie evidence of distances between and therefore infractions (either drafting or cutting in allowable / not legal) on which to base those judgements. With sufficient data communications, processing and analysis I can also see 'Ref Central' providing direction to moto refs of athletes to 'target'. But any card waving has to be 'on the road'. KISS principle applies.

Me too! Real time data would be even more interesting.

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Genetics load the gun, lifestyle pulls the trigger.

Perhaps I've missed any updates on how pros felt this went but I'm interested to hear some feedback from those who participated or at least watched up close and personal.

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Genetics load the gun, lifestyle pulls the trigger.

In F1 races they have designated DRS zones where a driver within 1 second of the car ahead gets reduced drag from the rear wing which allows him to go about 20km faster and make a pass.

I wonder if RR and course officials could designate areas on the course where the drafting zone isn’t enforced. Like in those braking zones, or even going up a steep climb where there’s no drafting benefit.

Yes, the platform already has so-called 'no-policing zones', with the idea/theory that'd be used for things like steep climbs, sections coming out of transition in towns/cities, etc...

Obviously, the platform isn't being used in autonomous-penalty mode at this point, so it's somewhat of a throwaway conversation. However, one conversation Race Ranger was going to be having with Ironman and other race orgs after this, is how to look at the illegal drafting time post-race (for which this is the first race that it's downloadable), and begining to establish what is in effect a bio passport for drafters. No penalties are being handed out post-race, but it could form the basis of where to allocate refs/officials on races going forward, to athletes that seem to accumulate a lot more illegal drafting time than others.

It'll be really interesting to see after a year or so, if this becomes the norm on the pro circuit (across multiple race orgs), as I suspect how it's used will begin to change. There's tons of options, really just a matter of what humans agree to.

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My tiny little slice of the internets: dcrainmaker.com

I don’t know what their plans are moving forward and how to implement, but I think if they used them all next year, and spent the year sifting through the data and figuring out what needs to be tweaked, adjusted, fix the bugs, etc., then roll it out in 2025 complete with penalties, and let athletes challenge what they think are unfair rulings after the race. No more penalty tents. Just add the time on at the end (but alert the athlete that they incurred a penalty as soon as it happens).

I’m no pro but I did race yesterday. My bike was right next to the pro rack in transition so it was cool to see the race ranger on all the bikes.

It also made it super obvious who was a pro and who wasn’t when out on course!