About Momentum

Motorsport results in New Zealand have always been published and then scattered: a class sheet pinned up at the circuit, a club newsletter, a timing provider's page that goes offline when the series changes supplier. The racing is recorded meticulously and then becomes very hard to read as a whole. Momentum is an attempt to put it back together in one place, so that a driver's career, a class's history and a circuit's lap records can each be read end to end.

The archive currently holds 2,007 race meetings across 42 circuits and configurations, from 1949 to the present, and is added to as meetings are timed.

Where the data comes from

Nothing here is invented, and nothing here is scraped from another site's editorial. Every result originates in race timing:

• Modern transponder timing. Meetings timed through MyLaps are imported from their published results: classifications, lap times, and lap-by-lap detail where the timing feed carries it.
• Historical timing files. Decades of earlier meetings come from the raw output of the timing systems used at the time, parsed back into structured results. This is where most of the twentieth-century archive comes from.
• Club and series records for meetings whose timing output no longer exists in machine-readable form.
• Entrant and vehicle records contributed from historic racing and entrant registers, which is how a result can be tied to a specific car rather than just a car number.
• Weather at the time and place of each session, from a public historical weather archive.
• Drivers themselves. A driver who has claimed their record can correct their own details, add the cars they raced, attach their onboard video and upload their own telemetry.

Live timing during a meeting is a separate, provisional feed. It is labelled as live while it runs and is superseded by the official results once the meeting is imported.

What it does with it

The hard part of an archive like this is not storage, it is identity. The same driver appears across 78 years of timing sheets as half a dozen different strings: initials, all-caps, a misspelling, a married name, a transponder code appended by the timing system. The same class is renamed every few seasons. The same car is entered under three different descriptions.

So underneath the results there is a canonical record for each driver, car and class, and the raw strings are mapped onto it. That is what makes a career page possible at all, and it is why a driver's history does not break in half when a series rebrands. The original strings are never overwritten, and every merge and rename is reversible, because the alternative is an archive that quietly loses its own provenance.

On top of that sit the things people actually come for: lap records by circuit and class, an ELO rating that lets drivers from different fields be compared, head-to-head records, championship standings, and per-driver analytics. How the numbers work sets out the mechanics of each of those, and what they can and cannot tell you.

What this site is not

It is not an official record. Momentum is independent: it is not published by MotorSport New Zealand, by any club, series or timing provider, and it carries no authority over a result. Where the archive and a club's official results disagree, the club is right and we want to know about it.

It is also not a rulebook or a protest venue. Results are recorded as they were timed and classified on the day, including penalties already applied. A finishing position that was later amended by a stewards' decision is only correct here if someone tells us, which brings us to the next section.

Corrections

Corrections are the most useful thing anyone sends. A wrong name, a result credited to the wrong driver, two records that are really the same person, a car attributed to the wrong owner, a lap time that cannot be right: all of it is fixable, and fixing it at the source improves every page that reads from it rather than patching one screen.

Use Report an error from any page and the report arrives with the page you were on attached. Every correction is reviewed by a person before it is applied. Drivers who claim their own record can make many of these changes directly.

Who runs it

Momentum is built and run by James Watson, a club-level competitor who has also done event photography and series organisation, as an independent project rather than a commercial venture. It has no advertising and sells no data. It exists because the racing was worth keeping properly.

The quickest way to reach a human is the error report form, which goes straight to the person who maintains the archive, or the Momentum page on Facebook.

Accounts and access

Most of the archive is public and needs no account: driver profiles, event and race results, lap records, the leaderboards, class and circuit pages, championships and the upcoming calendar. There are no passwords anywhere on the site; signing in is a six-digit code sent to your email address.

A free account additionally opens lap-by-lap data, the analytics pages, driver comparison and live timing. A Premium account, free during the current beta, adds a driver watchlist with push notifications, a public profile, profile and car imagery, and stat banners. Professional profiles for photographers and suppliers are free to register.