This year, the IndyCar Series has offered Indy Race Control, which can be ordered from the link in the sidebar. Race Control includes four online in-car streams utilizing the new 360-degree on-board cameras. It also offers a near-realtime leaderboard, track positioning, and pit stop timing. Here’s my take on it.

First, it would be very easy to instantly go negative on it. There were, without a doubt, a number of bugs that weren’t worked out before the Homestead race. I won’t, however, because I actually enjoyed the product, even with its flaws. First, telemetry didn’t work for the first half of the race, if not further. Second, Helio’s in-car view was seemingly accompanied by Oriol Servia’s radio. Finally, it definitely liked Internet Explorer better than Firefox.

Before the race, here’s what we saw:

Well, while the kinks took a bit to work out, the interface itself was a bit small for my window. That was pretty minor, though. After I worked out the kinks on my end, all four streams worked. In fact, I was pretty impressed with their quality. There was a definite lag between the streaming video and my TV. It was roughly a half a lap at speed, maybe a little more. It was actually kind of nice as you had just enough time to click to the appropriate stream when something happened on TV.

For example, here are some fun capture of Danica’s evening:

Some great captures from Helio:

I don’t want Justin Wilson to feel left out:

I don’t really have any good shots from Wheldon’s car, but I had his on when later in the race, boom! Telemetry!

The leaderboard started up late, and I think that’s why it may look a little questionable. If you look closely, you’ll see that 5th position through 8th position was all cars long out of the race. All columns were sortable, though, which was nice. The telemetry was lagged along with the in-car streams, which was a bummer. I don’t know that you can avoid that delay, though.

There is also a performance analysis option.

While it may not necessarily be ground breaking technology, I love having the little golfballs run around my screen. It was nice to be able to visualize the gaps.

I didn’t really have an opportunity to see the Pit Performance option in action, as all yellow flag pit stops had been performed by the time telemetry came up. Here’s what it looks like, though.

You have the ability to select the three drivers on the left from the entire field.

Finally, there was the cockpit view.

It was pretty uninteresting on a 1.5 mile oval, but I think it’ll be more interesting on the road and street courses.

So there are a bunch of screen captures from the experience. I personally liked it. I heard Wheldon swear about how hard it was to turn his wheel. I got some great views of Helio battling as you saw above. I hope they can reduce the latency a little, but it didn’t bother me too much. I’m always going to watch the TV first and foremost. This was just good stuff to have to supplement the TV. I do hope, though, that the kinks experienced this week are gone by next week. I wouldn’t go as far as to call it a “must have”, but I liked it.

Update: I contacted the people who run the service, asking them some questions that I had. I’m posting them here for you, as they may be useful to you:

Q: After Homestead, there were some bugs, which wasn’t necessarily unexpected for the services first time live. While not unexpected, do you feel these kinks have been worked out for future races?

A: Will, there were some bugs that we are well aware of -our team in constantly striving to pick up these errors and make the necessary changes to improve this product. Unfortunately the telemetry went down for 75% of the race and this was due to a connection at the track on the track. Unfortunately the technology on Saturday at the track was bad on all ends (television end as well). We have identified the issue and made it a high priority to fix for this weekends race. It has been tested over and over before this weekend’s race and should have no problems for the remainder of the season.

Q: The latency between the televised race and the Indy Race Control service was noticeable, arguably around 20-30 seconds on my end. Is this going to be improved, or was the time-gap considered optimized at Homestead?

A: This is something that we are tracking and trying to make improvements to as soon as possible. First priority again is ensuring that our video feeds (in-car cams) and telemetry are working well first, then we will take steps to modify.

This is already on our to –do list, but a great point.

Q: The four in-car streams weren’t without their kinks, but, at least for me, the quality was pretty good. Is there any intention to announce the four in-car cameras ahead of time? Any hint on what the on-boards will be for this weekend’s race?

A: This is something that we can look into, although it may be difficult as IndyCar sometimes is not able to provide us with the driver names until a day or two before the race. For now the key is to make our product the best it can be – next step make improvements around the promotion of the product (Thanks for the great idea)

Q: Are any improvements or new features to the system expected as the season progresses?

A: Yes, although we do not want to announce what we may be doing for the Indy500. This will be based on our technical capabilities.

But feature enhancements are definitely getting looked at now for this event as it the largest event of the season.