Le Mans 2008 is starting in an hour and I have received a number of email concerning "race events", updating in general and how to get the tracker to work. Here is how...
I will update the Live Tracker when Lemans.org releases the correct Race Events data. Their site is currently displaying "waiting data", on their website. It things goes like they did last year, it will probably not be updated until the first "event" happens sometime in the race.
The Live Tracker works by "fetching" the race data being displayed on Le Mans website. For most of the time this data is as "live as it can be", usually only being delayed a few seconds. But, as we saw in during the first qualifying session lemans.org "forgot" to update the English version of their data for most of the evening. And last year they forgot to update their site at all for more than 20 minutes into the race - and for 35 minutes during the night.
There is really not much I can do about this. I can only hope that lemans.org will be a little more efficient during the race. If the race data isn't up-to-date, try switching to the French language version.
Depending on the type of update, it will either be displayed automatically inside the tracker, or you will have to download the tracker again. You can read when it has been updated in the sidebar.
The Live Tracker has only been tested in Firefox 2+, Internet Explorer 7 and Safari - on Windows Vista and Mac OS X Leopard. A few people have complained that it doesn't work in some version of Linux, for that I apologize but I do not have the time or the resources to test it with every system.
Sometimes the lemans.org website doesn't respond fast enough for the tracker to load. The solution is to hit refresh (F5), se if that does it - if not hit refresh again.
Note: This is only a problem in IE7 for some reason unknown to me.
This is a problem with the Club24 website. If you login to Club24 and see the webcams there, you will see that it often fails to display the images. In my tests I found that as many 18% of the images from Club24 is either completely missing or only partially displayed.
The Web Cam tracker will try to detect the faulty images, and skip them. But, it isn't perfect.
Indeed they do. I can only imagine that they are still setting things up (although I think they are pushing it a bit since there is so little time until the race starts). In any case there isn't anything I can do about it. The web cam tracker will only display what Club24 sends out.
I hope this answers most people's questions, if not post a comment.
Every year I go nuts about Le Mans (at least according to some women I know). Not only do I watch the race, I also create a ton of other stuff to make the entire experience more fun.
While we wait for this year's Le Mans, I am going to post a number of articles about some of the racing cars to take part of the event. But yesterday I got an email from Porsche about their new Porsche Panamer - and it was so funny.
Audi has created a movie about the legendary 24 hours of Le Mans, from Audi's perspective. It is a thrilling story, about what it takes to be a part of this amazing event. Definitely worth a look, if you are into this sort of thing.
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