Roadmap #3: Building A Digital Hub

Think about how you normally enter a sim racing championship.

You find the sign-up form in a Google Sheet. The rules are a PDF somebody linked in a Discord channel three weeks ago. The calendar is a pinned message. The results are on a different website. The server password arrives by direct message, usually from a person who is asleep when you need it. And when you want to know whether that penalty from round two actually changed the standings, you ask in Discord and hope.

None of that is anyone's fault. It is just what happens when a competition is assembled out of whatever free tools were nearby. The DEC does not work that way, and this article is about the thing that replaces all of it.

One Platform, One Truth

Everything in the DEC lives in one application, and every part of it reads from the same data. There is no version of the standings that is more correct than another version, because there is only one. What that means depends on who you are.

If you are a driver, you get a personal dashboard: your profile, your career statistics, your penalty history, and eventually an automatic Endurance Index rating built from your pace, consistency, racecraft and incident record. Your data, kept for you, not scattered across four spreadsheets nobody will find next season.

If you are a team manager, you get a team dashboard where you invite drivers with a link, manage your roster, register for a season, and pay the entry fee properly through Stripe. No bank transfer screenshots, no waiting for someone to confirm you exist.

If you are a race official, you get a dedicated Race Control Room for the incident queue, investigations and published decisions, exactly as described in Roadmap #2.

And if you are staff, you build championships, manage entries and manage the calendar without ever opening a spreadsheet.

One Account, Even If You Are Three People

Most people in sim racing wear several hats. You drive, you also manage your team, and a couple of rounds you volunteer as a steward. Normally that means multiple accounts, multiple logins, and remembering which one you are currently signed into.

The DEC platform uses a Split Shell instead. The public side of the site behaves like a normal website, with a top navigation bar for browsing news, the calendar and the standings. The moment you log in, that top bar disappears and the whole thing becomes an application, driven by a sidebar on the left.

That sidebar is assembled from your permissions. Driver, manager and steward at the same time? All three areas appear in one sidebar, in one account. You never switch profiles and you never log out to become somebody else.

The public pages are built into the dashboard as well, so checking the standings or the entry list during a race weekend never means opening a second tab and losing your place.

Two more choices you will feel rather than see. Investigations, server credentials and most detail views open as panels that slide over what you are already looking at, instead of loading a whole new page, so you keep your context. And the public site and the dashboard are built mobile-first, because you will absolutely be checking your entry from your phone. The officials' dashboard is the deliberate exception: it is designed for desktops, because live track maps and penalty queues need screen space, and pretending otherwise would make race control worse at the exact moment it needs to be good.

Why It Will Not Fall Over On Sunday Night

A 24-hour race is hard on drivers. It is also hard on software. The platform is built on modern, professional foundations, with Next.js for the application and PostgreSQL as the database, hosted on proper cloud infrastructure rather than a cheap box somewhere. That is not there to impress anyone. It is there because at hour nineteen, with everybody watching the timing screen and stewards processing incidents, the platform has to be as fast as it was at hour one. You will also never create a password for the DEC. You log in with Discord, and you link your Steam account.

Both do real work for you. Discord means the correct roles appear for you in our server automatically, instead of a human noticing and promoting you by hand. Steam confirms you actually own Le Mans Ultimate, and ties your entry to a verifiable identity rather than a name somebody typed into a form once.

One rule comes out of that, and it is worth knowing before you register. Le Mans Ultimate identifies drivers in its result files by the display name you race under, and nothing else. So your DEC display name has to match your in-game name exactly. Get that right and your results, penalties and statistics find your profile on their own. Get it wrong and they belong to nobody.

Speaking of that data: I am developing a lightweight telemetry agent that reads live information directly from the game and sends it to the platform. That is what will eventually power live timing and give stewards a clear picture of what actually happened on track, rather than three people describing the same corner three different ways.

Where All Of This Came From

None of this was improvised.

Before any code existed, I spent weeks designing the whole thing on paper: the database structure, every screen and flow, the stewarding logic, even the interface texts. The result is a Software Design Specification and a set of flow documents that describe exactly what this platform is and how it has to behave.

That is deliberately the boring way round. It is also the only way a project this size does not collapse into a pile of half-finished features six months in. In Roadmap #5 I will explain exactly how that specification turns into working software, because that part surprises people.

Why You Are Not The Only Customer

The DEC itself is funded by team entry fees. The software is a much bigger thing than one championship, so from day one I designed it as a product other organisers can subscribe to and run their own competitions on. They get their own independent version: their own domain, their own colours and logo, and their data completely separated from ours.

I am not hiding that, because it directly benefits you.

It means the software running your championship is a professional product with real customers, not a hobby project that survives only as long as its creator stays interested. It has to keep working, keep improving and keep being supported, because people other than me will be paying for exactly that. Sim racing is full of excellent tools that quietly died when their creator got a new job. This one is built not to.

What Comes Next

The foundations are being built now, and some of what comes after them is already designed.

Live timing and a live track map inside the app itself, so you do not need extra software on a second monitor to see where your rivals are. A "What if?" championship calculator to work out exactly what you need in the final round. Automatic Mumble voice channels, created for your team the moment your entry is confirmed, with no manual setup at all.

Further out, and depending on what turns out to be technically possible, I am exploring automation with RaceControl.gg for server setups, a driver and team matchmaker for filling empty seats, and an AI assistant to help officials process data faster.

But let me be completely clear about one thing, because it matters more than any feature on that list: the DEC will never feel like a competition run by bots. All of this technology exists to delete boring administrative work, not to replace judgement. Automation is a tool. Human officials make every sporting decision, and that is not going to change no matter how good the tools get.