Racing isn’t always the most intuitive sport to follow. You always know when a Football team is playing defense, but you might not always catch your favorite driver’s pit stop on the TV broadcast, or you could miss a guy in a fast car who qualified poorly marching through the field. Those are the kinds of things that YouTuber Leuel48Fan won’t ever miss again, thanks to the home-made LED NASCAR leaderboard in his living room. This piece of motorsport fan ingenuity recently went viral when Dale Earnhardt, Jr. and NBC’s NASCAR social media channels shared the video.
Using NASCAR’s own publicly available leaderboard data, this software engineer built a seriously cool piece of useful home decor. Not only does this leaderboard indicate where every driver is positioned in the field, but it also has an orange line to delineate which cars are a lap down, plus lights to show car status and condition. With changes to the colors of driver numbers, you can see at a glance if someone is behind the wall or out of the race entirely. Little flashing lights show if a car is considered “damaged” by NASCAR, or if they’ve pitted recently.
This project is really cool, and I’d personally love to see this system adapted for other series as well. Leuel48Fan has indicated a desire to push this system into production and sell it to other race fans. If I could have one of these in the house to keep track of NASCAR, Formula 1, IMSA, WEC, and IndyCar, live and direct, I’d be a very happy customer. This thing has a lot of potential, and could be included in game rooms and “man caves” all over the world. Excellent work!