Five Items to Improve Your Day at the Track

Back in April we brought you our list of racing essentials – items that we would consider to be vital to a racer’s toolkit. As a supplement to that list, we have here a handful of items that can help make things a whole lot easier when headed out to the track. These tools and accessories can reduce hassles like wasting time running around trackside in hopes of borrowing or buying said items, and in turn allow you to keep your focus on racing by reducing the guesswork involved in the event that you need them.

 

 

GoPro BackPac: The BackPac is a removable touch screen display that makes getting great results with your GoPro at the track a whole lot simpler. Setting up your shot no longer requires you to fumble around with an app on your smartphone due to the BackPac’s preview display, and the touchscreen controls will greatly reduce the amount of cursing involved in adjusting the camera’s settings, as you’ll no longer be forced to contend with the camera’s built-in two button control scheme that indicates those settings on a display that’s about the size of your thumb nail.

 

The BackPac is also useful for playback of your recordings, and includes both an integrated speaker with volume control and a 3.5mm jack for use with headphones.

 

 

Work Gloves: In the almost-inevitable event that you need to do some work to your car at the track, a good pair of work gloves is a must. If you’ve been out in the car at speed for any length of time and suddenly need to work under the hood, you’ll want a pair of proper work gloves for the job because those parts are going to be hot. Getting your racing gloves filthy with grease and road grime is not an ideal situation, so bringing a pair of work gloves like these is definitely a wise idea. Machine washable and extremely durable, these gloves are specifically designed for all the abuses that pit lane can dish out, and they’ll also protect your hands more effectively than racing gloves will.

 

 

Helmet Bag: A bag specifically designed to carry your helmet might seem like a bit of a luxury item, but keep in mind that a drop from shoulder height onto asphalt has been known to put cracks in helmets – damage severe enough that it means you may need get another helmet if you want to racing. To make matters worse, helmets are an oblong shape that makes carrying them more precarious than it really should be, and of course one of your hands is also occupied carrying your helmet instead of other gear whenever you have it with you and you’re not wearing it.

 

Not only do helmet bags help protect your helmet from damage if it falls or bounces around during transport, they also eliminate the need to carry the helmet in hand, allowing you to carry more gear without the fear of dropping this particularly expensive piece of safety gear.

 

 

First Aid Kit: A first aid kit might not be the sexiest item on your racing wish list, but you know it’s something you need to have with you at the track. The problem with cheap, pre-made plastic kits is that they are outfitted generically, you don’t know how old the contents are, and the quality of said contents can be suspect. Though Winding Road Racing’s first aid holder doesn’t come equipped with medical contents (though we do offer a suggested checklist of items), it does come with a dose of retro style and a mountable design that allows you to keep it in an easily-accessed location so you or a team member can grab stuff in a hurry when you need it.

 

 

Tire Pressure Gauge: Keeping your tires in the correct pressure range throughout a day at the track as ambient and internal temperatures change is obligatory, both in terms of performance and safety, so having an accurate tire pressure gauge on hand with you at the track is very important. High end gauges also include useful features like temperature compensation, which calculates what pressure a tire should be set at in the pits in order to keep it at the correct pressure out on the track, where tires temperatures (and in turn, tire pressure) can change significantly. 

 

Not sure which gauge you need? Check out our Tire Pressure Gauge Buyer’s Guide for a look at the different types of tire pressure gauges available from the Winding Road Racing store.