Raceview Troubles reach a new low on NASCAR.com

[Old Stock Nut]

Like most (or even all) people, I have not managed to get Raceview working at all other than on audio on any of my PCs or browsers this season. I raised a trouble ticket with NASCAR Support just to see what would happen - stupid I know! I have had several pointless returns basically saying they know they have problems and hope to sort it out soon.

On Sunday during the Bristol race, I tried to raise the support guys by email and my trouble ticket just for the hell of it and I asked if there could be an issue with the data feed because I am based in the UK. Today I have had the reply to end all replies with a solution that makes me realise that NASCAR.com is beyond help. It reads... "Try using Chrome, FireFox, or IE 8 or 9 for the next event. The signal may not be as strong going to your area.....". Using Chrome is the only thing I haven't tried yet, but the suggestion that the digital "signal" on the Internet my not be strong enough to reach the UK is unbelievable in the extreme. Perhaps a satellite signal might just get a bit weak in very bad weather and one of the old analogue TVs might get weak if the aerial is poor, but the idea that the Internet might get weaker coming over the pond finally confirms to me that they have got lunatics running this system. Abandon hope all who enter NASCAR.com. Thank goodness we can get the races on Premier TV over here.

[slorydn1]

The problems are not just on your side of the pond. Its just as bad over here, trust me. I have been a trackpass subscriber since 2005 and so far this has been the worst year I can remember for technical glitches. It's so bad now that NASCAR.COM have had to disable the comments section on all of their articles under the guise of technical issues (really-technical issues with the comments section? For almost 5 WEEKS NOW??????).

Anyone else out there having issues with Raceview? Feel free to discuss it here, since you are not able to do it there.

[Old Stock Nut]

Guess what - They have now come back to me and admitted that they are having issues with Explorer!!!! I suppose that since Explorer only accounts for millions of users world-wide, we should forgive these developers for not being able to master it - NOT. I really do wonder if they have got some half-baked kids who have made a few I-phone and Android apps rather then proper software developers? It certainly looks as though the fact that NASCAR is so heavily paid-for by a mobile phone company that there is now little hope for anyone who uses Wi-Fi for proper computing and their entire focus is now on mobiles and 3/4G. The awful presentation of the new web site is testimony to that after all - probably looks fine on a hand-held mini-screen, but it is terrible on a proper monitor (unless you are partially-sighted, of course).

Having said that I had tried everything else but Chrome, it was inevitable that they would suggest that as the next option. I will try that for Fontana on Sunday and let you guys know how I get on before giving up on it completely.

[slorydn1]

Guess what - They have now come back to me and admitted that they are having issues with Explorer!!!! I suppose that since Explorer only accounts for millions of users world-wide, we should forgive these developers for not being able to master it - NOT. I really do wonder if they have got some half-baked kids who have made a few I-phone and Android apps rather then proper software developers? It certainly looks as though the fact that NASCAR is so heavily paid-for by a mobile phone company that there is now little hope for anyone who uses Wi-Fi for proper computing and their entire focus is now on mobiles and 3/4G. The awful presentation of the new web site is testimony to that after all - probably looks fine on a hand-held mini-screen, but it is terrible on a proper monitor (unless you are partially-sighted, of course).

Having said that I had tried everything else but Chrome, it was inevitable that they would suggest that as the next option. I will try that for Fontana on Sunday and let you guys know how I get on before giving up on it completely.

I use IE and Chrome and neither works perfectly. Chrome will do ok for a little while then the audio will drop out, then the app will lock up.....be ready to reload Raceview 3 or more times during the race.

[Old Stock Nut]

Tried it again last night for the quals and Chrome is the same as Firefox. Raceview loads and shows the drivers listed at the start and the various dropdowns work, but there is no data coming in to update it. I have tried taking the firewall off on the PC and on the cable modem but it makes no difference. Either the code is not asking for the update, the data is not being delivered properly, or there is some weird protocol being used that is not understood by anything on my computer. I am absolutely amazed that an organisation as reliant on it's fans and with as much money as NASCAR has allowed itself to get in to such a mess. I hate F1, but their site seems to be much better by far so perhaps they should ask them how to do it better..... Has anyone got the "paid-for" stuff from F1 to see if it works properly so that we can point NASCAR to someone with decent technical design and support and who knows what they are doing?

It's so bad now that NASCAR.COM have had to turn off content area on all of their content under the guise of details (really-technical problems with content section? For almost 4 to 5 weeks now and still no news of it when it is gonna be available again,. . .

[Old Stock Nut]

Hi all.

I have been working all season with NASCAR Support Desk to try to get Raceview working on my PC. We have tried lots of different accounts and loads of changes to my PC configuration. Having tried everything at both ends and getting the tech guys to confirm that it should work over here in the UK I finally decided it must be my network broadband link. So last night, I tried running my PC via a tether to my mobile phone to give it a completely different way to connect to the Internet (using the 3G phone path) and it all worked completely. Unfortunately, I have only got a fixed amount of data download on my phone tariff so can't use that for too long. I am now trying to find out what my broadband provider can do to make it work over it's link before I swap them out as well!! I will let you know if I finally get it working.

The main reason I want to get it working is that I find that the TV coverage seems to be more and more focussed on the two or three cars at the front and it is very difficult to see what is happening down the field when there are long green flag runs like there was last week, especially when a driver is not on the lead lap. The Raceview windows make it much easier to concentrate on other parts of the race to see how other drivers are doing when not at the front or crashing (seems the only way to get any TV coverage on your driver these days)!

[willracefan]

Are you talking about the leaderboard? Because I too noticed something different in over a year since I've been on it.

[Old Stock Nut]

Hi Will. Not sure how much you have kept up with nascar.com this year, but they completely changed the way Raceview worked and ditched the leaderboard as a separate application in favour of the one they now put on the site for quals and races. They also pulled the site design in-house over last winter and it looks like they have given it to a bunch of partially-sighted school kids. You need a 42inch screen and a seat across the room to see it all because they have made the whole thing so much bigger because the same site design was done to be viewable on smartphones (Sprint?????) I remember doing a course many years ago at Pipex in Cambridge on web design. At the end of the course we had to design an example web site with all of the bad things that we had been taught to avoid over the previous week. The biggest no-no was big data hungry graphics so my site had a huge picture of the Houses of Parliament I copied from a web page that took ages to load and meant that you had to scroll down before you could even move on into the site. It looks like NASCAR took my design and gave it to the local school kids to replicate!! I had to use my smartphone last night because I was out of wifi range to get to the site to confirm the start time for Sunday's race. It took ages and around 2Megs of data to download a picture of the track that I did not need that completely filled my screen before I was able to scroll down to get to the diary of the event. It is a complete disaster that is not worthy of one of the highest financial value sports in the world. I wish they had got those kids to take a page from the best site for information for all the years the web has been widely around ( news.bbc.co.uk ) and used that as a basis for the new site.

Getting back to Raceview, I tried it out first for the Duels and Daytona 500 and it was dreadful. Most people were having trouble even getting it to load at all. I couldn't get it to work for the next couple of races and so raised a support case with nascar.com. I have been exchanging tests with them ever since and finally proved last week that something was being blocked somewhere in my ISP (Virgin). I could get it to work if my PC was tethered to my smartphone, but not on the broadband. But tonight when I logged on for the Dover quals everything worked. I am not sure if NASCAR have found out what the problem was, or that Virgin have done something that removed the block with the new software in my Cable Modem/Router that I think they download in the past couple of days, but who cares, it seems to be working properly at last.

I like to have the virtual reality stuff in Raceview and have missed it a lot because I have found that this year, the TV seems to have been much more fixated on the lead pack than ever. By being able to have your own TV camera on any car and focus on the stats for it whatever the race place makes for a much more enjoyable and involved race.