Delivering data and providing live information from the race course is what Race-Trax is all about. Whether it be for the benefit of Race Management, broadcasters, spectators or competitors Race-Trax delivers; as proved at Skandia Sail for Gold 2009 the biggest Olympic and Paralympic classes regatta that Great Britain has seen.

The competition, which was the grand finale of the ISAF World Cup series, took place at the Weymouth and Portland National Sailing Academy, the host venue for the sailing events at London 2012.

This was the third consecutive year at the regatta for Race-Trax and was certainly the most challenging and complex of any regatta to date. Needless to say the Race-Trax team were right up there with the best of the sailors in terms of the effort and dedication that went into producing a first class result on medal race day.

Following on from the great sailing conditions earlier in the week the plan was to track the Laser, Star, Finn, 49er and Laser Radial medal races. But the first casualty in sailing, as in war, is the plan.

Showing great flexibility the Race-Trax team ensured that every fleet was fully prepared with no delay should they be called out. However despite all best efforts the Finn and Star classes were eventually abandoned and the Lasers were fully tracked out to the course area and back, twice, with racing postponed both times.

Finally it fell to the 49er’s and Laser Radials to produce the only racing of the day on the A course. Both races were tracked second by second with the race data being fed back to the Committee boat, then to the shore via Race-Link before being forwarded on for viewing LIVE! using Race-Viewer.

A second feed went direct to the event's 3D graphics provider for modelling and broadcast by the BBC. Because of the power of the Race-Trax system, the gap between recording the data on the water and delivering it to the users was under 2 seconds enabling live commentary in conjunction with live pictures from the course.

We are really looking forward to the next event where we will continue with our mission to help turn sailing into a spectator sport.

A 3 minute video version of the 49er Medal Race can be viewed here