First things first !! Segment 4 Picks are Due !!
And now just a short update:
The Team page has had a pretty big visual and behind-the-scenes update, with the goal of making it simpler and smoother to maintain and use.
You will notice a cleaner layout, better organization, and a few new status/announcement areas. You now also have the choice of a Dark or Light theme, along with a couple of background-image choices.
The pick submission process is also much nicer now. When you submit picks, you’ll get a quick review showing what changed before anything is saved. If you try to submit the exact same picks again, it will simply tell you that nothing changed instead of creating another submission, and you’ll get a clear confirmation when your picks are saved. Your picked drivers also stay populated for any further changes prior to the segment closing.
Behind the scenes there was a ton of work too. Some of it centered around things I hope we don’t have to use too often, like late picks and replacement-driver picks. If you miss the deadline, you won’t need to let me know anymore — the form will automatically become available for you to make your picks for the next eligible race. The same goes for a replacement driver: if you meet the eligibility requirements, the replacement-driver option will become available for you to make your one-driver change.
Much of this is being driven by an even larger project that I have been working on this year in preparation for next year. Some of you may know about it, and that is automatic race scoring. It’s a project I started way back in late February and has gone through umpteen thousand revisions and updates to get where it is today. I have been running it in parallel and verifying it against our official scoring every week, and I am happy to report that the automated results have matched our official scoring 100% in my weekly comparisons so far.
I will be sharing a lot more about this in due time, but another offshoot of the project is having live schedule data to drive things. I don’t know if any of you have noticed the race schedule on the right-hand side of the page or not. I used to have to manually edit that, but now it automatically shows the next five races without any intervention. Just a tiny thing, but now segment deadlines and pick-window openings are being driven from that same schedule source as well. If a race is delayed or postponed, the schedule data can adjust with it.
There is so much involved that it’s just too much to share in a “short” message that was originally intended to let you know that S4 picks are due soon!! 🤣
Of course, as you go to make your picks, if you have any issues or concerns, please let me know.
