Setup Genius — AI-Powered Race Car Setup Management
Motorsport / Racing Software

Problem
Race car setup is part-craft, part-science — and most of that craft lives in dog-eared notebooks, scattered spreadsheets, and WhatsApp screenshots passed around the pit lane. Engineers and drivers know what worked at a track last season, but pulling it back up at 7am on race day usually means flipping through pages or hunting through a phone gallery.
The founder came in with 15+ years in the V8 Supercar pit lane and a clear thesis: the knowledge that lives in elite race teams could be packaged for everyone from weekend club racers to seasoned pros — if the tool fit how race engineers actually think about a car.
Generic setup trackers had not worked. Racers did not trust them, the data models did not match real-world setup language, and there was no AI layer to turn raw setup numbers into "your front end is loose because of X — try Y."
Approach
We built Setup Genius as a multi-feature platform with the setup record at its core: every spring rate, damper click, alignment value, and tyre pressure stored against a track, session, and car. From there each module clips on — tyre inventory with usage and wear tracking, professional calculators for spring rates, roll centre and gear ratios, team sharing for crew alignment, and historical performance trends across sessions.
The AI setup assistant is the headline feature. It reads the current setup, the driver's stated problem ("understeer mid-corner", "no straight-line speed"), and the track context, and returns specific, racer-language recommendations. Underneath, that meant designing a domain model the AI could reason over reliably — not just storing numbers, but capturing how a setup actually behaves on track.
Built on Next.js with secure cloud storage so setups follow the team from the workshop to the trailer to the pit wall. Role-based access keeps driver, engineer, and crew on the same page without exposing IP between teams.
Outcome
Setup Genius is live and being used by racers from weekend warriors through to professional teams. The AI assistant has become the daily-driver feature — racers describe a handling problem in plain language and get back targeted setup advice, which removes the "where do I even start" moment that used to eat 20 minutes of every session.
Tyre inventory tracking and the built-in engineering calculators have collapsed three or four separate tools into one workflow. Teams that were juggling a spreadsheet for tyres, a calculator app for spring rates, and a notebook for setups now run the whole session out of one platform.
The shared-setup feature has changed how teams communicate on race day — the engineer, driver, and crew chief all see the same numbers, so the conversation moves straight to "what should we change?" instead of "are we all looking at the same setup?".
