Red Bull Drift Shifters - Case Study

The challenge

Drift Shifters is the brainchild of Mike Whiddett, arguably New Zealand’s best known and most talented drift driver. In his professional career Mike has traveled the world, racing in many top motorsport locations, but nothing that will come close to Red Bull Drift Shifters.

The challenge was to create a digital scoring system for the unique drift event, which could withstand the high speed drift cars and provide real time feedback to judge the event

Dreamt up by the drifting legend to remove the uncertainty around judges’ decisions in drifting, Red Bull Drift Shifters first hit the streets of Auckland in Mad Mike’s native New Zealand back in 2012. Now, it’s gone international, arriving on the UK’s shores – and the iconic dockside city of Liverpool – for the first time in 2018.

The Sniper solution

Working with our partners, we used industrial sensors and linked them into a digital computer system over Ethernet.

We wrote a custom scoring system which took the input from the sensors and processed it, combining them into combos (such as hitting multiple sensors in a specific order within a timeframe) and key events (such as driving under a semi-truck (like in Fast and the Furious)

The custom scoring system which was fully configurable and tuned on site, provided sound effects that were fed out to the crowd, live lighting effects over DMX and a digital data feed to the OB broadcast system for the live video.

We've worked on this event 4 times, and each time improved on the technology utilising more innovative solutions to speed up the event setup and provide better tracking of the cars