Hey, Richard Zinn here, inventor of LITPro and I love motocross!
Getting data in our sport used to be nearly impossible. As in you could get it if you were ok with either inscrutable zig-zags of lines from normal GPS products out there, or if you have the full financial and manpower support of a factory race team - those times are long gone.
LITPro gives you bike performance data, body data, and fuel for your mind. We’re not a data system, but we love data and we find really cool ways to make that data digestible and actionable. It is really easy to use - and here are the three ways I benefit from the LITPro system most. Quick and easy...
Hotlaps!! - call it sprints, heaters, PRs, whatever. LITPro calls them “Hotlaps” and when track conditions are good and you are feeling on your game then it is game on time! When I see the right conditions I’ll do a series of 4 or 5 motos of around 6 laps each and try and get that “Hotlap”. LITPro lets you know when you’ve got your own PR, when you’ve got the fastest lap amongst your riding buddies (linked accounts in the LITPro system), or if you have the fastest track record (either for the day or all time). Currently I hold two track records - since I focus on vet track riding I can usually keep those “Hotlap” records for a few weeks until the premier track is inevitably closed for whatever reason forcing the pros to come ride my track - then it’s over for me ;)
Focus on Technique - days where I’m just not feeling blazing fast, or the track conditions aren’t prime I focus on technique... basically pick an aspect and try and hone it. This could be standing through a section, consistency, intensity, jump technique, corner technique, forcing to go all outsides, practicing gatedrops, not crashing, whatever. There’s tons of aspects to this sport that get overlooked - and with LITPro you can focus on each and every one and perfect it. You can even connect your account with a coach, which adds an aspect of accountability to your riding and discipline to making sure you aren’t just out there trying to hit Hotlaps every time at the track. Taking motos/days to focus on “going slower” in order to go faster are of immense value and shouldn’t be left off the schedule!
Learn from Others - this is for days when you aren’t at the track... You can link accounts with your riding buddies and guaranteed you’ll find there’s no end to the bragging rights you get not only when you can show your buddy that your faster, but exactly where and why. Once your accounts are linked, you can compare any two laps in the system for any track you both ride. Then, if you want, you can play your track out and compare top speeds, jump lengths, rhythm choices, line choices in corners, brake points, throttle points etc. No-one will appreciate the skill you applied to a tricky section of the track more than someone who has also ridden that same track. Also, we automatically let you compare your fastest lap to the Hotlap at the track - even if you don’t know them. This is immensely valuable and you’ll learn a ton by seeing what they are able to do.
A few LITPro of my LITPro stats:
User since: May 2015 (1st)
Num Laps: 5,812 (29th)
Seat Time hrs.: 210hrs (36th)
Num Crashes: 203 (3rd)
If you are interested in sharing your love of riding and how LITPro has helped you progress let us know and we’ll be happy to work on publishing something with you on our blog!
Any questions or comments, I’ll respond to any questions in the comment section below.
So you’re ready to ride with LITPro again after a break. Here are a few tips:
#1 - Make sure you are using the latest LITPro App! If you are riding on dirt, use the LITPro MX App. If you are riding on pavement, use the LITPro Road App. You only need one of those two app’s now as we’ve combined all of the different LITPro capabilities into one.
#2 - Charge your LITPro for 10 minutes (or thereabouts) and then turn it on. There’s a chance that it will start blinking all different colors and become unresponsive. This happens because your LITPro is pissed that you haven’t used it for so long! Just kidding - it’s basically an error message that the battery voltage got too low when it was in storage. It will fix itself after you let it run out of power and then charge it up again. It takes 2 hours to fully charge the unit, but just 15 minutes should get you an hour of life.
#3 - Get out and ride.
One more tip - here’s a quick start guide that we include in all shipments:
Since September 2016, LITPro has been collaborating with the team at Inde Motorsports Ranch on product development and increasing awareness of LITPro’s applications in road racing. Our work together has been extremely positive for both LITPro and Inde.
Inde Motorsports Ranch is a full-service, member-oriented motorsports club located about 1.5 hours from Tuscon, in Wilcox, AZ. The 2.75-mile Inde track features multiple configurations and incorporates elevation change, blind corners, and extremely technical corner complexes. The track is a huge challenge and a great place for Inde members to develop their skills.
Inde provides members access to expert coaching from Lead Instructor and Head of Business Development Kai Goddard, and Pirelli World Challenge regular, Andy Lee. The challenges posed by the track and the expert instruction provided by Kai and Andy mean LITPro is uniquely suited to supporting Inde’s members as they strive for faster lap times.
LITPro has been integrated into many track- and race-day activities. Says Kai Goddard, “Having searched for a better data solution for years, we’ve found LITPro Road, which provides me with colorful, accurate, engaging data that can easily be viewed and analyzed. Ease of use is critical, and LITPro has it. The detailed racing line, ability to study corners and extract a variety of valuable insights is a simple format is amazing with LITPro Road. I would recommend this product to anyone, on- and off-road, professional or amateur. LITPro Road is our preferred data source here at Inde Motorsports Ranch and been proven to lower lap times.”
Andy Lee adds, “LITPro Road simplifies data analysis, making difficult driving techniques easier to visualize. That translates into better performance on track.”
The benefit to LITPro Road from the partnership with Inde has been enormous. We have incorporated feedback from Inde instructors into the Road App -- including features like session tagging that were recently released -- and raised the profile of LITPro in the Road Racing community. Inde will remain one of our most important testing partnerships for the development of new features and functionality going forward.
To learn more about Inde Motorsports Ranch, please check out their website: https://www.indemotorsports.com/
For more information about LITPro Road, please visit us here: https://www.litprolive.com/road-app
For the past several months, we’ve been beta testing a new version of LITPro called LITPro Road. Our goal is to provide a tailored experience for our two- and four-wheel customers who prefer pavement to dirt. Developing LITPro Road, we’ve been fortunate to partner with LevelUp Racing School (http://levelupracingschool.com/). This post covers some of the ways LevelUp is using LITPro Road to speed up the learning process in their racing schools.
LevelUp’s instructors have over a century of combined experience teaching race driving. And while they’re committed to teaching good fundamentals – the skills their instructors have been teaching and using themselves for decades – they’re also focused on incorporating new technologies to will benefit students throughout their racing careers.
LITPro is one of the technologies LevelUp has embraced. As many of you know, LITPro is a super-high resolution GPS system that gathers data about performance on track and allows the driver to see opportunities for improvement. LITPro's GPS is 10-20 times more powerful than the GPS in competing products and smartphones. This level of resolution and accuracy allows for comparison between drivers of lap times and speeds and lines through corners. LITPro is portable, and easy to install and use. Most importantly, it's geared toward athletes -- riders and drivers -- presenting data in a way that reflects the actual experience of driving a race car. LITPro Road offers a very intuitive, track map-based way of showing critical information to the driver:
In comparison, traditional data systems require a complex installation and present data in a way that is oriented to data engineers. Below is a screenshot from a very good but less intuitive data system developed by Motec. It provides a lot of information but is difficult for new drivers -- and even many experience ones -- to understand.
Because of its orientation to drivers, LITPro Road generates actionable feedback that the driver can put to work to lower laps times in the next session on track. For all of these reasons, LevelUp has chosen LITPro as our preferred data analytics provider.
There are a couple of ways LevelUp is using LITPro in their two-day schools. On the first day during our braking and downshifting exercise, LevelUp uses LITPro to show students how their technique compares to that of an instructor. Instructors can show different braking points, look for students releasing brake pressure during a downshift, and demonstrate trail braking.
For example, the LITPro screenshot above shows LevelUp's Chief Instructor, Peter Stoltz, braking for Turn 8 at Road America. The next screenshot shows a comparison between Peter and a student in our October school at Road America, Richard Zinn -- who happens to be the Chief Technology Officer at NZNLabs and who developed LITPro!
You can see that Peter brakes later and more consistently, doesn't release the brake when he blips the throttle on the downshift, and trails off the brake smoothly. Richard is still developing his braking skills and brakes earlier and less consistently. The ability to carry out comparisons in our braking exercise brings good technique to life for students and leads to immediate improvement on track.
On the second day of their schools, LevelUp uses LITPro to highlight differences between drivers in the same way a race team would use data to improve lap times. This is a typical use case for a data system like LITPro, and familiarizes LevelUp students with the process of data analysis, which is one they'll use throughout their racing careers. In data debriefs after sessions on track, students can compare their laps with those of instructors and other students. The focus is on on key corners, analyzing braking technique, line through the corner, and throttle application. LITPro makes it easy to see where and, more importantly, how drivers are gaining and losing time.
For instance, in the screenshot above, we can see that Peter has gained 0.6 seconds about a third of the way through this corner, Road America's famous Carousel, because he is able to carry more speed into the corner than Richard. The Carousel is a corner that requires the driver to trust the car at a high level of lateral load, and Peter's thousands of laps at Road America really show in his data.
However, as the second image shows, with the help of data from LITPro, Richard was able to improve his speed entering the carousel and clawed back some of the time he was losing on Peter -- the difference is now only 0.3 seconds at this point in the corner. Seeing that Peter could carry so much more speed into the Carousel gave Richard confidence to trust the car and gradually build his entry speed.
If you enroll in a LevelUp school, you'll learn to use LITPro Road and leave with a solid understanding of the way data can improve your driving. LITPro Road is just one example of LevelUp's commitment to teaching the time-honored fundamentals of race driving while also bring to bear new and exciting technologies on your progress as a racing driver.
If you’re interested in learning more about LITPro Road, please email Revere at [email protected]
Here at LITPro we launched a coaching beta on June 7th, 2017. We’ve got some big plans for coaching in our sport, so if you want to join the beta just go here and apply
If you are new to the coaching beta and have missed some of the earlier emails then below you’ll find a chronology of the progress we’ve made. A huge thanks to all the feedback we’ve been getting from everyone, I think it’s shaping up nicely!
June 27, 2017 (start here!)
We invited all the coaches in to Testflight. Testflight is an Apple service that enables us to get you pre-release software that isn’t yet available in the app store. If you missed this step, then please let us know so we can help you get set up with this. Just send an email to [email protected] or contact us here.
July 5, 2017 (first beta release)
We celebrated our first beta release! We only had it available on the iPhone at this point, and we had a quick video showing basically how things worked.
watch video tutorial - first release
July 29, 2017 (iPad & Athlete Switching)
We introduced coaching on to the iPad interface, and a new tool for quickly switching between athletes for coaches who train more than one athlete at a time (most of you). We released a video showing how those features work.
watch video tutorial - athlete switching & iPad
August 9, 2017 (Copy & Paste)
We released the most-requested coaching beta feature to date. You guys asked for it and we got it in there on both the iPad and iPhone interfaces. You can now copy or move workouts. And you can copy or move more than one workout at a time! This is a huge time saver.
One weekend in to the challenge and so far there are only 3 challenge participants who have been able to complete the requirements. Not even the Pro athletes who competed in A1 (the event that inspired this challenge) completed the challenge since due to weather one of the practice rounds was eliminated.
If this is the our hardest challenge yet then I guess this surprises me for two reasons:
1. I personally think the challenge prize is the best we've done so far. This is pretty subjective, but I think the shirt is pretty cool, and I like the yellow.
2. Our first challenge, the 200 lap challenge got tons of participation. And 200 laps is a ton more time on the track.
Here's a little inspiration for you coming from one of our 3 challenge participants who achieved the goal... and from a part of the world with only 4 hours of sunlight. Whatever your excuses are just remember Kusti...
“I think it wouldn’t be too bad in summer time, but now it was a bit hard :) The track sucked big time with frozen ruts underneath and loose snow on top and we currently have about four hours of decent light to ride, so it was already getting a bit dark at the “main”. The bigger problem was it started to rain “under freezed” water (the temperature was below freezing point) and the water froze to the lens instantly so I had to wipe the goggles all the time and actually had to take goggles away in midway of the “main”. If it wouldn’t have been this challenge I would have just packed it up after first session, so the challenge actually works, good job!’ Kusti Manninen ~ Finland
If you’ve downloaded the latest version of the LITPro MX app from the app store then you’ve got the most advanced corner analysis in the world. Just ride with LITPro, and we automatically detect every corner on the track (currently only available for MX and SX style cornering and speeds, but we’ll expand on this soon). If you do multiple laps, then this tool gets even more powerful because we help you quickly figure out what corner technique is working best. Is it faster to go inside, outside etc. We also know whether it was a right hander, left hander, pre or post apex, your total breaking time and acceleration time, as well as of course your consistency in each corner. And all of these metrics go in to helping you determine what is working and what isn’t. The new analysis we added that we haven’t ever shown before is an experimentation score (see below).
When your experimentation score is high and your consistency score is also high, that’s a good sign that no matter how you go through the corner, passing lappers, ruts blow out, etc, you can keep your speed up. That’s an exceptional style of riding that I haven’t achieved yet!
In addition, if you have shared your fastest lap data (enabled the Hot Lap feature) and there are others who ride your same track, then you can pull over the Hot Lap for the track for just that corner and see what the winning technique is. And you can compare to the fastest lap of all time at the track, or fastest on the same day to make sure you get matching conditions. We’ve found this to be one of the most effective features of LITPro.
First off, drum roll please... Congrats to Mathew (Australia), Ron (Nebraska, US) and Guilherme (Brazil) for being the winners of the challenge and getting the Oakley Air Brake google prize!!
Taking the October TIME ATTACK Challenge
This one, by all objective and subjective measures, was a tough one. We had high expectations for this challenge. In fact, the hope was to encourage a different kind of riding for the more average rider on the track... And we honestly thought it was impossible to get a score of 100! (see results here: https://www.litprolive.com/challenge/octoberTimeAttack) Well it ended up that quite a few people got scores of 100 and for the average rider this challenge turned out to be tougher than putting in 200+ laps. In fact so much so that it was a little discouraging to work on. Here's what was tough for me in particular...
1. The water truck... Pretty much every time I finally got into my groove the water truck pulled out, and even a little water on top of the so-cal tracks I ride turns the hard pack into a slip-and-slide and takes me a while to bring my lap times back in-line again. This is something I don't usually have so much trouble with... it was just bad luck and bad timing. I honestly think I had a chance at getting in to the 86+ range.
2. Getting passed... This was surprisingly the toughest thing. Riding hot laps for 10 laps straight is beyond my ability. I could put in two or three really good ones at a time, but by the fourth hot lap my times would always find a way to drop; either a tip-over in a corner, or a lapper or some other excuse. Interestingly my hot laps are all at around heart rate of 172 to 182 BPM. I've never put in a hot lap that wasn't in that range (and I ride the same tracks for months at a time), I guess that's the definition. I think being a pretty average rider, in average shape I suspect this is pretty typical. So, putting in mid-high pace laps was what worked best for me but then what became the real challenge is getting passed, getting hit by roost etc and resisting the urge to chase whoever passed me down. It's surprisingly tough. I suppose it’s the nature of the sport. But I did overcome this one when I needed to and although I did let go of maybe 3 or 4 almost complete 10-lap sessions by giving in to the chase... Once I realized it was becoming the biggest reason for my bad consistency scores I buckled down and kept my lines.
3. Dealing with lappers... After finding a way to solve for #2 above, dealing with the lappers and keeping up my lap times was the next toughest thing. Re-read the part about strategizing around a mid-high paced lap. If I hit a lapper at mid-high pace I could sprint for a bit to try and make up the time. However, if you are trying to put in 10+ hot laps, even if you are one of those gifted ones and have the fitness to go 10+ laps, it is by definition impossible to sprint to make up the lost time if you are already going sprint pace. If you are the kind of rider that can do all that, then you probably don't need to be doing our challenges anyway ;) For the rest of us, strategically picking your pace in the mid-high pace range seems to be the right way to go.
4. NOT riding an SX track... This was the most insurmountable one for me. And yeah this is a cop-out. Fact is though that all of the scores in the 100s and most of the scores in the 90s came from private supercross tracks. That self-selects in to a type of rider that is "pro", but also the type of riding is different than an MX track in that there are no lappers typically, the prep is better, the laps are shorter, and in my observation a single line can get worn in so deep it shows up in satellite images. So, yeah its an excuse but if I could set up the challenge all over again I'd at least do separate challenges for SX and MX tracks. Even looking at Mr Consistency himself (Dungey) you really can't compare his SX consistency to his MX consistency... It looks something like this (see image below of a pro on a test day at a SX track vs an MX track - for privacy reasons this is not Ryan Dungey data)
Looking at the leaderboard I think I'm not the only one who got a little discouraged (again, see link here: https://www.litprolive.com/challenge/octoberTimeAttack). It's actually a great thing to work on and probably just bad timing for a great idea since SX training pretty much starts in October for US teams, so doing it even a month earlier would have worked out pretty well. That said, I ended up 12th after we took out all of the non-qualifying laps (and the pro athletes who don’t need to win a pair of Air Brakes anyway).
Anyway, thanks to everyone who participated! I hope it was fun and that you learned something new in the process. We'll try and plan our challenges better going forward. In fact this November one we're starting later in the month to give those who want to participate a little heads up on what it’s going to be and to plan a bit better.
Honestly the idea came from Strava... I’ll admit it... they are a great brand and service. We’ve got no problem emulating them in a few ways ;) Among the many impressive things that Strava does as a company is their efforts to put a sport into context. My favorite was an article they published that equated the number of servings of Escargot needed replace the calories exerted in a leg of the Tour de France (among other stats). It actually doesn’t really put it into context for me at all since I never have eaten, nor plan to eat Escargot, but the stats seemed impressive nonetheless.
So the spirit of our September challenge simply began with this... putting into context what a professional athlete goes through to train and participate in a professional motocross series. It’s an incredible number of laps and air time and cornering, and practicing starts, and etc (As in... more time in the air than a trip from San Diego to Las Vegas). It’s crazy! But no better way to really put this into context than for the average moto enthusiast to try and put in 200 laps in 30 days. Case in point... I’m in good shape, but I have to admit I’m finding it difficult. Here are all the ways this challenge registers as a “challenge” to me.
1. Finding the time
I’m never going to go pro in this sport, but it doesn’t change my passion for participating in it... I love to do it, and that means I have to make time for it amongst a busy schedule with family, a crazy job here at LITPro that I love, and other things I do to try and stay healthy. It means going at night, or first thing in the morning on a weekend - and there’s always an opportunity cost. Going more into depth on this though here are a few stats:
1 Moto Lap = 1:50s average
200 laps = 6hrs of seat time
6hrs moto time = 1hr 20mins air time
6hrs moto time = 6+ days at the track (see explanation below)
And all of this translates to maintenance costs, tires, travel to and from the track, cooling down between motos, etc. Its a huge time commitment! The average mx enthusiast according to our records puts in an average of 22 laps per day at the track (close to an hour of seat time every time they go to the track). Some of you may think this is super low, but I am talking about the average mx enthusiast, and then consider that I’m not talking about all the time you wait for the arm pump to go away after putting in a couple heater laps. I’m talking about actual ride time doing laps. So at the average rate, that’s a little over 6 times per month you’d need to pack your gear up and head to the track. Most people (including me) can’t keep up that pace and still keep everything else in life running smooth.
2. Staying healthy
I also have trouble with this one. I typically go down on the track about once every 12 laps. And usually just in a corner, so not a big deal. But in my pursuit of getting to the 200 lap mark this month I’m starting to be able to track the number of laps before a real get-off occurs. And that’s not good - but it does remind me that I’m alive, which is good :) So far, I’m at about 93% of the goal now, currently in 23rd place on the leaderboard, and I’m sidelined for at least a week before I can put in the remaining number of laps. Here’s my crash analysis...
3. The physical aspect
Even when I am staying healthy... it’s over 6 hours of seat time on a moto track. That takes a lot of energy and strength. And I still get a little sore after every ride, and I still get blisters. In my summary below (for September so far), I’ve put in a little over 50 minutes at my peak aerobic heart rate zone. That’s a lot of exercise and will wear anyone down.
The gains though...
So far, aside from the staying healthy part, my lap times are getting way better. In fact, in one session, my best lap time came at lap 35. I’m pretty impressed so far. At my level of riding, I’m pretty sure nothing is better than seat time. More to come on this though...
While we celebrate this visual showing track configs created by LITPro users across the globe, we also realize that this is just a growing problem for us and a burden for our users... Moto tracks change quickly and riders need to adapt. It’s part of what makes the sport fun. But for LITPro customers it is also a hassle to figure out what track is the most current and when necessary to create a new one.
The good news is that we think we can change. And btw, the visuals aren’t just an attempt to make things look cool. We’ve been researching solutions to the problem for quite some time. Our first approach was to curate them ourselves (notice the curated and HD Trackmap icons in the screenshot below):
manual curation effort
We realized months ago that that wasn’t going to work either since there are just too many tracks getting created every day. So for the last few months we’ve just been letting our customers suffer through it... Sorry!
Our next approach... this one actually... is to do a combination of automation as well as some internal tools to help us look for clusters of tracks. Generally we think that if there are more than 3 options at any one spot, then it is asking too much of the LITPro user to figure that out and typically something not-so-good happens, which is the user creates yet another new track... further exacerbating the problem. So our tools now help us look for clusters of tracks where problems exist and after applying automation, one of our admins can quickly jump in and sort things out further manually.
Australia track map clusters
Two-stage Track Config Cleanup Strategy...
Starting immediately you’ll notice that we’ve built some automation to clean things up. This means that we use some pretty simple logic to look at the track config and if it isn’t what we would consider a “good one” or rather a good one for the general public, we just delete it. This makes sense because a lot of times a track config is created to solve a short-term need, like learning how to use the system, or maybe even looking at a crash. So you create a custom config and it isn’t valuable to the public, or even you really after the analysis has been made... you’ll notice that most likely that track is now hidden in the system. NOTE! your data isn’t hidden, your sessions at that track will exist forever, but your ability to log new laps at that track are now gone.
In the next release or two you’ll notice some improvements to track configs in the sync app that will enable us to do a lot of cool things that we’ll announce later. But most importantly new changes coming to the app will make it easier to name a track if you are creating a new one, version a track if you are just making changes to a track, and last but not least make it easier to know if there’s already a suitable track to select from that someone else has already created. More on these new app features coming soon.
What you need to know (BRIEF VERSION)...
We have dramatically cleaned up the track configs across the globe deleting the ones we didn’t think were good “public” tracks
NONE of your existing session data is lost, even if we did delete the underlying track config
If we deleted a track config you are still using and you want us to restore it just ask... restore deleted track config request Just let us know the name of the track you want restored.
If you are still seeing too many track config options at your local track also let us know and we’ll scrub it a little cleaner. Track config scrub request Just let us know the general area and we can do the rest.
REMINDER: Quick tips on creating a good track config
Give it a good name... i.e. Milestone Main V2
Create it with 3 to 5 segments
If a moto track, use the same start and finish line
And as always re-use the track configs as much as possible (if the track layout hasn’t changed, then creating a new track shouldn’t be necessary)
As you’ve probably noticed, we’ve become part of the NBC program for this year’s Lucas Oil Pro Motocross series. There’s nothing quite like the pressure of getting put under that kind of spotlight and in the process of figuring out how to respond to that we’ve come up with a few innovations that we think everyone will be able to benefit from. First, let me summarize the main hurdles to bringing our metrics in to broadcast television... I don’t think these will surprise anyone familiar with running LITPro for a team of more than one riders ;)
Logistics... Syncs take a long time, cell coverage is difficult at best, the TV truck is often really far from the teams/riders we support. And the pace these guys set to air a show is impressively fast
Clarity... We have great data, but you have to work at it a bit to make use of it. TV viewers aren’t used to having to work at understanding something they are being shown.
LITPro MX app adaptations for NBC (new features)
While we think we’ve got a lot of great ideas still to come, we’ve made some incremental progress towards solving these so let’s jump right in to the list of changes:
now clearer lap pointer visuals (even shows your profile pic if you've uploaded one) making it easier to see what laps you are comparing.
clearer ahead by... behind by... textual indication when comparing laps. Plus it now works correctly...
easily tell which line is shorter with a new visual when comparing two laps (the new animated, solid blue line)
smart keyboard shortcuts (just hold down the command key on the lap screen to see hints for all the available commands). For power users for sure...
now correctly displays speeds over 100mph :) I didn't test this myself, but I know some people who did. haha
more playback speed options (8x, 4x, 2x, 1x and even a half speed option)
smoother playback (no jitter, it is now SUPER smooth)
LITPro SYNC app new features & changes
More changes to the app to improve the ease of use and work-flow especially when trying to manage a team or "fleet" of riders (+ bug fixes). For all the coaches/trainers and team managers out there who have more than one rider wearing LITPro, this update will make it far easier to manage tracking because now you can do it remotely. Just make sure LITPro is on before your riders get to the queueing area, then launch the "Fleet Control" screen in the app and you can start/stop tracking on all the LITPro devices in your account that are in bluetooth range.
This helps keep sync times shorter since you can start/stop tracking closer to the beginning/end of a moto, even when it isn't convenient or possible to gain physical access to the unit. It also help give you peace of mind that tracking is on since you can quickly confirm that the devices are in tracking mode.
Let us know how we're doing - especially if you have ideas on how we can improve!
If you are one of the lucky ones to buy LITPro recently (and your SYNC app shows v2.3 next to your LITPro) then your LITPro will sync around 2x faster. This means a 40 minute moto now takes around 10 minutes to sync and show up in the MX app (down from around 20 minutes). Big thanks to a friend at Apple (Craig D.) who has been helping us tune this up!
We know that with the teams and athletes we work with the most effective time to do a moto analysis in the LITPro MX app is within the first 20 minutes of finishing a moto, while the rider still has everything fresh in their mind. So we’ve been working hard to get LITPro to operate as closely as we can within that narrow window of biggest opportunity. The challenge for us is that we collect a lot of data during a moto, but even more challenging is dealing with the really low throughput of the Bluetooth 4.0 technology we use for Sync. Anyway, we’re pretty happy to be making more than just marginal improvements in this area. Hopefully more to come.
And if a 2x improvement still isn’t fast enough (which we know it isn’t for some of you), LITPro LIVE is getting released soon and in that mode your session is ready to review faster than you can even get back to the pits!
We recently went through a massive overhaul of the backend system in order to prep for some of the cool features we have coming up. For most of you the transition was probably transparent. However, look below to make sure you are all set:
Migration Checklist:
Make sure you get the latest apps from the app store here and here
Repeat on the one above!! We are turning off the old system soon, so just get the latest apps and you're good to go
If anything is missing in your account just let us know at [email protected]
As we’ve had a break from the Motocross season and have been thinking of how to step up our game coming in to the Supercross season we got busy working on some of the most requested features from the teams we work with.
Here’s what you can expect to see with this release:
Added ZOOM (custom zoom ranges)
Added ZOOM (automatic by track segment)
Ghost lap feature fully supported in this new zoom view
Completely re-worked segment summary, segment details and segment map view reporting (the old segment reporting is gone!)
10X faster HD Track Map rendering
Added Drift Correction
Session Weather now works for non-US sessions
Better metric unit support, including showing Celsius vs Fahrenheight appropriately
We think this is the biggest release we’ve ever made as a company, so we hope you’ll be as excited about it as we are. Our goals for this release are as follows:
To better identify the areas on the track where you can make the biggest performance improvement.
To better compare performance in specific sections or turns/jumps between laps. Now you can see exactly what line or rhythm choice was faster.
To better match up your line with the underlying map of the track.
Everything we do is to help our riders get faster and we hope that these new features translate exactly in to that.
MORE ABOUT ZOOM
We’ve been asked tons of times why we didn’t support pinch/pull/pan, all the typical mapping application gestures. Well here’s the answer... NONE of the LITPro app interface is map based except setting up a track configuration. This spawns from a few different things...
1). Our GPS resolution is higher than Apple/Google maps allow currently in their SDKs. Prior to iOS7 when they went to a 64-bit architecture/instruction set, Apple’s internal floating point numbers weren’t event big enough to store the lat/long resolution of a coordinate at the precision level that LITPro was tracking them at. So our lines had this ugly jaggedness as the coordinates rattled around in the sub-epsilon ranges of what could be stored in Apple’s MapKit coordinate system. Floats in a 64-bit architecture now solve that, but not the zoom level we want to achieve with HD Track Maps. In other words a LOT of complexity gets solved for us to present the data in the way that we do - and yeah we’re pretty awesome!
2). Even though it seems logical that pinching to zoom in is the correct way to interact with our data - and we’ve struggled with this for a while now internally - ultimately we’ve just decided a mapping environment isn’t what we want. With a map you have the freedom to go explore anywhere you want and this degree of freedom limits the precise level of analytics we want to deliver. For example we want to let a swipe gesture bring across a Ghosting lap, not move the viewport. Many other examples exist...
We also don’t just show zoomed in areas of a map, instead we prioritize context and comparison. So setting a starting and ending point for some analysis is really important to us, and you’ll see that this is handled quite elegantly when you get a chance to check this out.
ZOOM... ergo DRIFT CORRECTION
Yes there are always consequences! Now that we let you get intimately close to your lap routes in this new version, minor variances in Satellite constellation positioning and atmospheric density changes DO cause drift even in our data sets. These variances in drift are typically consistent, so usually you don’t see any impact between laps tracked in a single session, so while this has never impacted the value of our reporting and analytics, it is annoying to look at... And totally unnecessary. So introducing DRIFT CORRECTION. See what this does in this video:
We’ve broken down thousands of jumps from pros in the 2015 SX and MX seasons to try and determine if what happens in the air is a consistent predictor of winning races/championships and here are our results for your review.
Our initial goal when we started this project internally was to figure out if we could score airtime. This is a bit of a strange concept however, since what is good airtime vs bad airtime? Is more airtime better? Plus, everyone knows what good looking airtime is, and we agree that massive whips look pretty cool. We also wondered if we had enough resolution in the data we track to measure the difference between a great flight path and a good or average one.
Fortunately we had tons of data to look at to answer these questions, which you will see below.
NEW AIRTIME METRICS
To answer these questions however, we needed to define a few new metrics. Here’s what we thought was important to look at:
Takeoff Speed: Measured in MPH at the point of leaving the lip of the jump.
Drop Speed: Or landing speed. This is the speed the moment the jump ends (bike lands back on the ground). We expected to see a consistent speed drop rate across all athletes - however, we realized the speed drop was only consistent to a rider. Technique comes in to play.
Bounce Rate: This is the rate at which a rider bounces on the landing, for example coming up short, or landing too far out in the flats. If it results in a bounce we found this to be a significant factor in overall jump performance.
Airtime: You already know what this one is. The amount of time in the air. Knowing takeoff speed, landing speed, apex point, and time in the air, you can now see the exact flight path with certainty. So this one is important.
Jump Distance: This is the distance from takeoff point to landing point. Measured in feet.
Jump Face Pitch: This is the pitch of the jump. Since we aren’t measuring the bike, but the rider’s head here, we are again measuring technique here, and really this metric is only interesting when comparing one rider to another. Some technique flattens out the jump face by quite a bit, whereas seat-bouncing a jump for example makes the jump face look quite different to us. So this metric really only helps inform us on technique when comparing one rider to another.
Landing Gs: This is the average measurement of Gs in all directions on the landing for the duration of the landing (usually around a half a second). Again, this is measured on the head, and therefore differs from one rider to another based on technique and bike setup.
Num Samples: This is the number of samples used in calculating the metric. This is the number of times an athlete did the specific jump being studied (removing any outliers, like sight laps).
Jump Consistency: This is represented in two ways. One by looking at the standard deviation of the score across all of the samples taken for a specific rider. Another representation of consistency, is the amount of scatter in the landings. This can be a function of changing track conditions and lap traffic, so not always the best measurement. Visually you can see this by the size of the bubble at the landing in the graphics.
OPPORTUNITY: This is similar to our Lap99. This is a measurement of how much time a rider could save if they were to hit the jump using the best score measured for that jump across all riders. This is therefore the theoretical fastest way across this track feature. Because of how this is calculated, this means the rider with the best score has an opportunity for improvement, but it is smaller than the opportunity for improvement from the lowest scoring rider.
JUMP SCORE: This is a score from 0 to 100, where a score of 100 is a flight path of a straight line. So the closer the flight path is to a straight line from the take-off point to the landing point the closer that score is to 100. A score of 100 however is quite impossible in this sport. One other calculation that we factor in to this score is whether or not we see a bounce after landing. If there is a bounce we penalize the score. The reason for introducing this penalty is that it is possible to get closer to a score of 100 if for example you are doing a step-up and you land short, as in you hit the face of the step-up, as opposed to the landing at the top. We found that when this happened the score was always higher than hitting the landing, but in no way is this actually faster. Ergo the penalty... To illustrate the mechanics of the “Score” see this next graphic:
WHERE DOES THIS DATA COME FROM?
To be fair to our great athletes and teams we’ve been working with, we aren’t going to disclose what rider data we looked at, but we will say which tracks we took the data from:
Daytona SX, 2015 72ft triple on the north-east side
Glen Helen MX Nationals, 2015, 85ft double over the tunnel
Glen Helen MX Nationals, 2015, 110ft jump in the north-west corner
At each of these venues we had various riders wearing LITPro, and the colors in the graphs are no indication of what team they belong to, so don’t try and get any clues.
THE RESULTS
Jumping right to the results... We’ve all heard the statement, “Jump for show, corner for dough”, well we think this is not so true. The more winning the athlete the better their metrics are in every category. Let’s take a look:
Although we aren’t saying who’s data belongs to which riders, we have to say that we are really happy with the above metrics being a great predictor of overall race finish times. Riders who have consistently better technique in the air consistently place better on race day. What is also very remarkable about the data above is that despite every one of the riders having to deal with lappers, lap traffic, and quickly changing track conditions the top placing athletes were far more consistent in their technique than other riders finishing lower on the list. In fact we were so interested in understanding how much lap traffic and changing track conditions factored in to how consistent a professional rider can be on their airtime technique that we created a specific study to answer that. This next graphic shows a selection of riders on a 72ft SX style jump, but where we know there is no lap traffic and track conditions remained ideal throughout the observation period. Here’s what we found:
FINAL THOUGHTS
What a rider does in the air is more than just for show, and in fact a single jump can add up to a second or more of improvement opportunity on race day. If you consider that typically 1/3rd of a riders time on an SX track is spent in the air, this amounts to a very important area to optimize around. And again, despite lap traffic and changing track conditions, as an enthusiast myself, I’m thoroughly amazed at how consistent all of these athletes can be on these track features.
Interested in being a beta tester and getting early access to one of our latest new features? Get more information about the beta program and fill out the application form. Check it out!
In the latest release... We’re experimenting with a new feature allowing you to write notes about your ride, what the track was like, engine maintenance records, bike setup, what technique was being practices, whatever you want. We’ve had this request from a few notable teams and we are happy to make this available to everyone and see if it gets used.
As always, let us know if you have any suggestions on how it could be better.
To use this, just sync your session, then inside the latest LITPro MX app, load one of your sessions, and click on the new “notes” icon in the upper right corner. We’ve pre-populated a few data points in there, like weather, and a few section headings we think you would want to use to save some typing each time... But as we see how it gets used (or not) we’ll adapt.
