We apologize to all the round-the-world fans for our continued slacking as our Senior Editor works on his comprehensive look at the renovated Volvo Ocean Race. In the meantime, the Anarchists continue to get creative with the free tracking data that VOR HQ is sending out to the world. There are constantly new bits of pretty colors to look at, and some of them are even useful – how’d you like to know polars for every boat in the fleet?
True, the data on the left isn’t all that accurate – it’s based on single 3-hour tracker data readings after all – but in a race that will probably be decided by boat lengths, the more information available to the fans, the better. As long as they keep coming up with cool ways to display it!
The Polar on the right comes from SA’er “Volodia”, who has been propogating the simple but solid tracker many of us have been using to measure distances amongst the fleet. Also active has been SA’er “C Hawk”, who built an entire ‘Public Tableau” experimental dashboard recently, featuring a wide variety of graphs, charts, and diagrams that document all sorts of interesting facts about the Volvo fleet.
Of course these developers are limited to the public data available, and we hope the VOR folks continue to add more of it to the stream. But for now, these crowd-sourced tools are a must-see for anyone as dug into the race as we are. So use ’em.
UPDATE: We’ve just learned about two new crowdsource data sites – here’s a map/tracker, and here are more data displays.
