The absence of RaceHero since the start of 2025 has left not only the karting community, but the motorsports world without an interactive live timing app for mobile devices. Currently, Speedhive – developed by MyLaps – serves as the default live timing service for those utilizing the Orbits scoring software.

Karters and motorsport enthusiasts now have a new option with the launch of Race Select Live. The new app will launch prior to the Cup Karts North America Grand Nationals 9, set for September 25-28 at the New Castle Motorsports Park in New Castle, Indiana.

The free version for any track is limited, think more like Race Monitor but with a modern look. The standard version is for series and clubs that operate on Race Select. This brings with it additional features like schedules, grids, penalties, notifications and more. Finally, individuals will be able to purchase a subscription for advanced statistics and analytics. The subscription version is completely optional, and is free to everyone during a preview period for the next few weeks.

“Race Select Live was first envisioned even before we released Race Select,” stated M. Keith Warren, owner and founder of Race Select. “Most tracks at the time were using Race Monitor and I found it lacking. RaceSelect registrations came first because the market needed a solution focused on karting, not car racing. I always thought we would make the timing app very quickly after the RaceSelect release. The series were far more interested in tools to help operations behind the scenes. I kept wanting to build a new timing app and even did some prototypes, nothing was ready to release yet and no one seemed desperate for something new.”

Warren continued, “Then in late 2024 I got alerted shortly before the news broke, about RaceHero shutting down. That put the wheels in motion. We thought we had several weeks to plan and work with our customers to let them know we had something coming, but things happened much quicker than we anticipated. The news broke and we probably took 100 calls, emails and texts that day asking what we were going to do. We discussed it as a team for maybe a couple minutes before I made the decision, we would commit to the racing community to build something. It would be free to any track.”

Much like RaceHero, Race Select Live app is developed by racers for racers. Warren and his company went the next step, working directly with karting organizations, race teams, and competitors to enhance the data and information provided.

“For the first month it was just purely research, talking to partner companies in the market and getting a feel for how we do it,” added Warren. “In January, we put together our first iteration and tested with a large series in Orlando. We did tests with Challenge of the Americas, Cup Karts North America, United States Pro Kart Series, and many others. We talked to racers, team owners, tuners and mechanics. We talked to the dad’s on the fence line and the people back at home watching via the apps on their phones. What was missing? What do you wish it did? We watched closely how people used other apps and what was lacking. From there we had a series of themes emerging.”

One of the themes for Race Select Live was to incorporate what it is the user is looking for. Each and every individual using a live timing app has different desires or needs for it. Be it from the general viewer, looking to see who is where in the running order, to the team managers or owners following each of their drivers.

“The app should know where you are, remember what race you are watching,” Warren said. “No more scrolling through a list of events trying to find one. It should know who you follow, who your kid is, who is on your team. Team owners don’t care about 50 karts, they care about the five or so that run under their tent. Drivers want to know how they looked relative to their best competition, how they did compared to their teammates and friends. Moving from the recent session to past sessions to look things up often takes seven or more screen changes. We want that to be one or two at most. People have patterns, things they constantly look up like ‘did I get faster or did the track get faster’ and to do this they manually seek out other drivers, comparing their times on a recent session with previous sessions to determine the differences and make a judgement. About a dozen of these patterns emerged and that became our basis for what we were building.”

Going beyond the personalization of the app, Race Select Live helps to dive deeper into the analytics of each session. The standard ‘Purple’ color signifies the quickest lap of the session. Race Select Live is introducing the ‘Gold’ lap. The Gold time is the average of your best three lap times.

Beyond the timing itself, Race Select Live will provide a solution that will integrate lots of key information from the race weekend. Series and races that are using the Race Select system will take things a step further, showing schedules, penalties, race results with penalties factored in, grids for upcoming races, and later this summer, Race Select will update the championship points positions in real time, during the race.

“We are going to stumble and things won’t work perfectly, we have learned in our testing over the winter that every facility and system has its own quirks. When you see weird things happening with RaceMonitor, Speedhive and others it is rarely the app that is the source of the problem. We know this prior to launching the app and are trying our best to smooth out the rough spots. But that leads us to 2026 and even bigger plans in this space.”

Website: RaceSelect.com/app

Facebook: RaceSelect

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