Tracking the number of laps on your engine, rear end, and other critical components is crucial for proper maintenance. This practice ensures that parts are replaced or serviced before they fail, preventing costly breakdowns and keeping you competitive on the track. While most racers know this, many are inconsistent when it comes to their lap count diligence.
In this blog post, we’ll cover the importance of tracking laps on your race car components and some of the best practices to make sure you’re on top of it.
First, let’s discuss why it’s important to track laps on your race car.
Research shows that professional racing teams meticulously log laps to track wear on engines, driveline, and chassis components. For local and regional racing, maintaining an accurate lap count is just as critical—it can determine whether you finish a race or end up with a costly mechanical failure.
Without proper tracking, components can exceed their recommended service life, leading to preventable breakdowns. A well-maintained car is not only more reliable but also more consistent, giving racers a competitive edge throughout the season.
Think of how many components require maintenance. Top teams in the local racing circuits monitor over 40 different components! Each has specific lap thresholds for maintenance, service, or replacement.
Without a good system, it becomes extremely overwhelming to remember which car replaced or maintained universal joints, spark plugs, oil change, radiator flush, transmission fluid, wheel bearings or how long you have been running valve springs.
Keeping track of those laps can be a nightmare, especially when race nights vary. Warm-ups, heat races, feature races, special events, consolation races (“consi”), and even DNFs all contribute to different lap counts each night. Those fluctuations make it difficult to determine exactly when a part reaches its maintenance threshold by just counting race nights.
What adds to the complexity is how each component will have different laps because they are serviced and changed at different times.This issue happens all the time when you need to replace a part at the track and start again from zero.
Sure, you can write it down. But it becomes yet another thing to keep track of. Miss some laps, forget to add practice days, or don’t add the right amount of laps to each part means you’re trusting gut feelings rather than staying on top of your race car maintenance.
There’s a significant financial implication to this, too. Replacing parts too frequently when you don’t need to will waste valuable funds, and replacing them too late risks a preventable issue on race day.
Now imagine you’re competing with two different race cars throughout the week—one for Friday night short-track racing and another for Saturday events. The issues with tracking laps become compounded. Without a proper system, it’s easy to lose track of what maintenance was done—and to which vehicle.
Solving the lap tracking challenge is easy with RacePrep, your Smart Race Car Maintenance app.
With RacePrep, it takes seconds to add laps after each race. Easily record, track laps, and stay on top of maintenance for all the critical components on your race car(s). You can see all of the components you’re tracking with their lap counts on the car’s dashboard.
Laps are automatically added to each part when you update them. Each component also has the ability to set custom lap count thresholds to trigger maintenance notifications. Once hit, the app tells you which ones need immediate attention, and which ones need servicing soon. This proactive approach means fewer mechanical failures, better finishes, and ultimately, more wins.
If a component fails, you can replace it on your car and reset the lap count on the individual part. Each lap on each component is tracked, so you’ll always have the lap history. This accurate usage data is especially helpful to have when it's time to sell your used engine, transmission, or chassis.
By structuring your maintenance program with RacePrep, you’ll reduce part failures and improve your consistency on the track. Fewer breakdowns mean better finishes—and ultimately, more success in racing.
Don’t leave your maintenance up to guesswork. Start tracking your laps the smart way with RacePrep!
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