The Weather Company

HOW NASCAR OUTSMARTS THE WEATHER

Nick Franza was high above the action of a NASCAR race, in the area known as “race control,” when he first noticed something that didn’t seem quite right. Race control is the beating heart of every NASCAR event, and as the organization’s senior manager of technology development, Franza was intimately familiar with the work of these employees—and with the data and systems they used to keep tabs on everything happening at races on the wildly popular stockcar racing circuit.

Weather, of course, is a huge element of that monitoring. But Franza and his colleagues saw an inconsistency: not everyone was using the same weather apps or information services. This meant that different employees might be making decisions based on inconsistent readings, and in a sport that requires incredible precision, NASCAR needed a platform that could establish both uniformity and accuracy. So they connected with The Weather Company to make it happen.

“There are millions of dollars’ worth of decisions to be made,” Franza says. “Weather really impacts us from an operational standpoint. It’s a core part of what we do.”

Few sports are as reliant on weather-driven decisions as NASCAR. Higher temperatures can mean a slicker track, and higher humidity can decrease the horsepower of the cars themselves. Headwinds and tailwinds can impact the balance of the cars. Everything from cloud cover to impending weather can impact the decisions that individual pit crews make.