A live timing system for the world's greatest road race.

A rider leaves the startline at the bottom of Glencrutchery Road. Thirty-seven miles away, someone in a grandstand refreshes their phone. Someone in a garage in the paddock checks a lap split. Someone watching the live stream from the other side of the world wants to know where their rider is.

They all need the same thing: the right number, right now.

Building a system that delivers it, to thousands of people at once, without breaking, is a different problem to building a website.

The scale of the problem

The Isle of Man TT is the world's largest road race. It runs across 37.73 miles of public road for four weeks. The audience is global. The data is constant. And when a race is live, everyone wants it at the same time.

Millions of data packets move during a single race. Traffic spikes in ways that would bring a conventional hosting environment down. The timing data has to be accurate, instant, and available to thousands of concurrent users whether they're standing at Ramsey Hairpin or watching from a sofa in Japan.

This isn't a content management problem. It's an infrastructure problem.

What the system had to do

Real-time data delivery at the speed the TT demands meant building from a different starting point than a standard web project.

Data infrastructure A Node application consuming real-time APIs at speeds conventional server-side languages couldn't match. Data parsed and stored in a NoSQL database, structured for optimal delivery as the race progresses. Any change to the data pushed instantly to every connected user without a page refresh.

Hosting A serverless platform that scales automatically to handle any level of demand, regardless of where in the world the user is. During stress tests it handled a volume of requests that would resemble a DDoS attack on a conventional server. It didn't flinch.

User interface A live leaderboard, lap times, sector splits, race commentary, and schedule. Built to work on mobile, tablet, and desktop. Fast enough to be useful trackside. Clear enough to follow from anywhere in the world.

What it delivers

Thousands of concurrent users during race sessions. Hundreds of thousands over the course of the event. Fans trackside with the timing open on their phones. Race teams in the paddock checking lap splits in real time. Riders' families watching from overseas with a direct line to the data that matters.

It's also become a tool the teams themselves rely on. The same system serving a fan in the grandstand is informing decisions in the garage.

2023 marked the third consecutive TT where DotPerformance has delivered the official live timing platform. It has served every race without failure.

Built for the moment it matters most

Most digital infrastructure is tested against ordinary conditions. The TT live timing system is built for the moment when everything happens at once. Race day. Tens of thousands of people, all pulling the same data, all expecting it instantly.

The TT runs because the infrastructure holds. That's true of the roads, the marshals, and the timing system.

Three events. Millions of page views. It hasn't missed a beat.