RallyTime Pro: an interval-start stopwatch for spectators

Only a few weeks ago, a motorsport rally fan got back to me saying: "I like your smart stopwatch, but I need something a little different." The resulting new rally timing app — RallyTime Pro — went live today.

The person, as it turns out, was a huge fan and industry insider of rally series like the World Rally Championship and the many smaller, local events. There is a great community behind the car rally sport — for some it's a rally, for others a rallye — particularly in Northern and Central Europe, but reaching all the way to Africa and Australia. And that community, I learned, has a timing problem all of its own.

The problem of a rally spectator

Unlike swimmers or runners, who start in heats together or — as in a marathon — in close time proximity, rally cars start one after the other, on a set interval of a minute or two. Sometimes that interval changes: two minutes for the most serious group of professionals, say, then one minute for the bulk of enthusiast participants. But otherwise it is fairly stable.

The track itself is more like a marathon course than a stadium: arbitrary roads in the wild, through open fields and woods. And that's just one section — insiders call it a "special stage," or just a stage. Each rally consists of multiple stages, potentially over several consecutive days.

So as a spectator, you pick a spot where you expect a good, long look at passing cars and some real action — sharp turns, jumps, and the like. And then you stand there, somewhere in the wild, with cars passing you one by one, most likely in start order, and you wonder: who's winning? At this point, at least?

After an hour or two the official results come in and everybody knows the answer. But standing right there at that needle turn — where's the fun in waiting an hour to learn that car #13, which is just passing you, actually was three seconds ahead of the competition at this very spot?

An interval-start stopwatch

Spectators have improvised for years. Some time the gaps between passing cars with traditional handheld stopwatches to get a feel for performances. Some use simple egg timers to estimate the next car's arrival — which is also a matter of safety, because guessing wrong about when the next car comes makes crossing the track a dangerous option. But these means are cumbersome, complicated, or deliver little insight. And they are boring.

What a rally spectator really needs is a different kind of instrument: an interval-start stopwatch. Because the cars start on a known, fixed interval, a single tap as each car passes is enough to compute how far ahead or behind it is against that schedule — live, on the spot, car by car. It is the same core idea as Herotime — one button, many timed entities, the app keeps the bookkeeping — applied to a start pattern that no swim coach ever sees.

So, after a number of discussions back and forth with the insider who contacted me, I built a special stopwatch just for rally fans. Early users tell me it's awesome and an absolute industry first. RallyTime Pro also carried over some favorite Herotime traits: physical-button support, a night color scheme for those dawn and dusk stages, and open timing of any rally beyond a set of predefined ones.

What this says about the technology

For me, the real story here is range. The method behind Herotime — timing many entities with one button and letting the app handle the assignment — was designed for coaches. But manual timing problems come in more shapes than heats and lanes: interval starts, staggered starts, one-after-the-other starts. The same foundation handled a completely different sport with a few weeks of focused work.

I am always asking for feedback and suggestions, including any other timing problems you face — and I am listening, and acting. So: what's on your mind when you use Herotime smart stopwatch? Maybe there is a special solution to your special timing problem, too.