NASA Northeast’s Mike Torricelli started racing in that region in 2019, but his involvement in the NASA Northeast Region goes back a lot longer than that. Back in 2006, then-new Regional Director Joe Casella handed him the timing and scoring equipment at the start of the event — and Torricelli has been responsible for the role ever since.
“We go to Watkins Glen and he goes, here’s a bunch of computer stuff. I have no idea what it does, but it has something to do with timing and scoring and I know you’re the computer guy, because I had done some timing and scoring for autocross,” Torricelli said. “So he is like, “You’re the only one here who has any experience. So here’s the stuff. It’s all yours.” And I’ve literally had the transponder in my possession since 2006. The same transponder, the same decoder.”
Torricelli manages the entire timing and scoring process, which includes setting up equipment, distributing results, and creating race grids under tight deadlines. Torricelli also supports other racers by transporting, maintaining, and storing their cars, which allows him to earn some income while helping other racers. He is known for his attention to detail, particularly in managing the strict numbering system for racers to prevent confusion and penalties.
If you ask about Torricelli’s day job, he will tell you he is part of a team of engineers for a public utility in New Jersey. If you ask about his other day job, he will tell you he is the owner of AZP Installs, an auto repair shop in Kenilworth, N.J., that specializes in Subaru cars. That familiarity with Subaru is what got him an invite to tour a Subaru factory in Gunma Prefecture in Japan.
While visiting extended family in Japan, Torricelli leveraged his connections to tour a Subaru factory. During his visit, he met with high-level executives who sought his input on what models and features would resonate with the American market. We don’t touch on this till the end, but to hear the story, it is entirely possible that Mike Torricelli has done every American Subaru enthusiast a huge favor.
Toricelli has built a Subaru BRZ for use in HPDE, one of many cars he owns. In addition to heading Timing & Scoring, he also is a NASA instructor and served as race director for 5 year in NASA Northeast.
So you know, Torricelli worked timing and scoring at Daytona for 2021 Championships, and at Watkins Glen in 2016. In 2012 he was a race director at Mid-Ohio.
We caught up with Torricelli to ask him as much as we could about timing and scoring, how it works, what the challenges are and why he does it. The things you don’t know about timing and scoring can affect you directly, your results and season points totals, all of which can affect your contingency payouts.
Q: OK, first things first, what are the main things you wish everyone knew about timing and scoring?
A: The work the timing and scoring team puts in starts long before an event and doesn’t end until days after the event. The back end systems are about 20-25 years old and don’t tie together as seamlessly as one would expect. Manual entries and updates before during and after the event are not uncommon.
Patience and reading your regional CCRs on how to submit changes is key. Just because a change was made on your national profile does not always roll it forward to the local region. If you need to make a change, put it in writing if possible, either via email or even on paper and hand it to the T&S folks, so they can make the change and have the data in front of them, even if you pop out of the tower and back to the paddock. Also make sure your phone number in the national profile is accurate. We’ve called people to clarify changes, and it makes it easier on our end.
Q: What’s the most challenging part of timing and scoring a live race?
A: Besides the technical part of making sure all the links in the chain are working, the most challenging part is when there are yellow or black, or red flags. Often times racers will exit the track prior to crossing the loop in some of those cases showing them down a lap or in incorrect order. Another item is when penalties are issued to change places rather than a straight DQ.
Q: How do you handle discrepancies or protests related to lap times or finishing positions?
A: Generally discrepancies are due to calls by the Race Director or group leaders. Very rarely do we have issues related to the timing side of things. When a transponder doesn’t hit, we will attempt to manually score them but sometimes get together with the RD, and with video evidence, will manually place them in the correct finishing position. Not many issues in this area for us.
Q: How do you prepare before a race weekend to ensure everything runs smoothly?
A: We keep a database of car numbers transponders and classes, and we direct racers to our regional website to make changes where the form sends us a PDF with the information needed for the timing system, so we can prep it. We also put the schedule into our system ahead of time as well. In the Northeast we always have a test day the day before the event, so we get there Thursday night and set up so we can test on Friday, which usually works out any bugs.
Q: Have you ever had a system failure or unexpected issue during a race? How did you deal with it? Did you have to do hand-ticking?
A: Never had to do hand ticking in 20-plus years, but we did have a cell phone interfere with the loop wiring during an enduro. Luckily we were able to manually input the data, and everyone was right where they were supposed to be. We keep two computer setups and decoders running as a failover.
Q: What kind of training or background is helpful for working in timing? How did you find yourself in the booth?
A: Any background and a true love of databases and spreadsheet manipulation is key. You also need to be extremely detail oriented to succeed. Lastly you have to realize it is a thankless job. You sit in the tower most of the time, get to the track first and leave last. The positives are you meet all the racers and they all know you, so you make a lot of friends. Additionally, in winter you are warm and summer you are cool and there is no rain involved.
Q: Did you ever race? What and when?
A: In 2004, I did my comp school at the first NASA Northeast comp school. If you look on YouTube at my AZP Installs shop page, you will see it captured on grainy video. It was a 1996 Impreza L automatic! I also served as race director and timing and scoring director from 2008-2013.
Q: How do you verify and publish results, and how quickly do you try to do that after each race?
A: We attempt to get the PDF results posted within 24 hours of a race weekend and season points up within two to three weeks.
Q: How do you coordinate with the tech shed after the race?
A: They roll up to group leaders who roll up to race directors who roll up to us. We only accept DQs or penalties from the race directors to keep it simple and regimented.
Q: Have you seen any memorable finishes or timing-related controversies over the years?
A: We’ve had a few folks finish in the .01s delta, which were pretty exciting. Not many controversies since the computer is fairly objective!
Q: NASA Northeast experimented with putting a whole lot of different kinds of cars into ST4. How did that work out? How was the racing? Did it make your job more difficult?
A: For us it’s data in data out.
Q: So, inquiring minds want to know: In the event of a dead-even “photo finish,” would a car with the transponder mounted at the front beat the car with a transponder mounted at the rear?
A: In my opinion, it would because they were smart enough to mount it in the front. We leave those decisions to the racers and the RD.
Q: Give me some of your racing history.
A: I did comp school in 2004 in NASA Northeast at the first NASA Northeast Comp school. I only did about a half a dozen races. I think I still actually have a provisional license that I renew every year.
Papa Joe gets the email from NASA National, and he is like, what is this? I’m like, I have to keep renewing my provisional until I get my license.
Q: Do you have a track car?
A: Ryan (Stone, his co-worker in T&S) and I have the same BRZ. Actually, we have four BRGs. My girlfriend (Yuko Hayakawa) is a driving instructor and now she’s a group leader, and she was the 2022 Northeast instructor of the year and she drives every event, multiple groups.
We decided that we would just use my car and split the track insurance because you can have two or three people on the track insurance. So it works out pretty nice.
Q: When did you and Ryan Stone team up in the tower?
A: In about 2008, Ryan came, I knew him from Subaru stuff and he came and was like, Hey, can you instruct me?
So I instructed him and I’m like, how many of these events do you plan on doing? He was like a computer programmer, and he goes, as many as I can afford. I can’t really afford many. I just got out of college. So I said, well what if I told you that you wouldn’t have to pay for any more of these events, you just to come and do timing and scoring with me? He’s like, I’ll be at every event. And Ryan and I have been at 99 percent of every event since.
Q: OK, tell me about your car number database. NASA Northeast says no duplicates whatsoever, right?
A: Probably the thing we get the most flack about is like, “Yeah, but I’m just TT’ing and I need 125 as my number.” And we’re like, “Yeah, but a guy in ST4 also has 125.” They’re like, “But I’m not racing. And he’s not TT’ing.”
But what if he wants to TT now you’re both 125 and it causes a problem. Or what if one day you decide you want to race, you’re going to come back to us when we tell you that you can’t have 125 and you’re going to go, “Oh, but my whole racing career I’ve used 125 and how can you do this? Can we make an exception?”
If you just start with a number and you compete every year, you’re grandfathered into your number, nobody else can take your number and it makes it easy.
Also, if you’re both on track at the same time, you don’t want to be accruing penalties for the other 125. If he passes under yellow and they call it in, you don’t want to get DQ’d when it was the other guy or vice versa. Last but not least, if somebody comes to us and goes, number 125 was speeding through the paddock, we know exactly who number 125 is. They kind of understand when we explain it like that.
Q: What is the hardest part of the job?
A: The hardest part of the whole weekend is making the grids from qualifying to qualifying race or practice to qualifying race and qualifying race to the grid for the race because of the time factor. So usually the races end by 4 o’clock and the awards aren’t until 6 or 7. So you always have two hours to work out problems at the end of the day, but you got to get those, you have to have to get the results from the qualifying either race or qualifying itself, get the results, make the grid, get the grid distributed to the grid workers.
Sometimes when they make the schedule, they don’t take into account how long that might take. And sometimes it’s a quick turnaround of an hour and 20 minutes, an hour and a half, which sounds like a long time, but it’s really not.
Q: You mentioned something about going to Japan. How did you end up there?
A: We went to go visit Yuko’s family, who are still in Japan. She’s from just outside of Toyota City. We went to visit them, and we wanted to go for a tour of the factory at Subaru, but it was sold out.
Since I have a lot of ties with Subaru I told my people here (in the U.S.), and I’m like, “Hey, can you guys get us on one of these tours that sold out and not sold out but filled up? So they’re like, “All right, we’ll see what we can do.” So they put me in touch with who they said were interns at Subaru. They’re like, “Yeah, these interns, they’ll be able to take you around, show you a couple things at Subaru. They took us to the proving grounds. They took us to two different factories, and I mean we were literally walking on the line.
Q: That seems like a lot of pull for “interns,” but I’ll leave that alone. What did you all talk about?
A: I said, get rid of the WRX, bring the Levorg here, which is basically a WRX wagon. They’re like, “Really? Why bring a wagon?” I said, “Listen, most of the people that buy the WRX are 25 or 45. It’s usually a first car, first beginning a family. They need it to go skiing, they needit to go to the track, they needed to go to Home Depot. And then when they get a kid, they need it to put the baby carriage in the back.” They’re like, “You know, Subaru of America never told us this.” I said, “Well, I’m here on a mission from God to tell you what they really need.” They’re like, “Oh, tell us more. We want to know more.”
And I told them they should just make an STi line across the board on all their cars like BMW has an M sport, Mercedes has AMG and Audi has the S Line, and whatnot.
I said, “You already have all the parts here. You don’t have to do any extra crash testing. You don’t have to do any EPA stuff because you’re not going to add any more power. I said, put in the electronic dampers, put in the Recaro seats, put in the black headliner, put on fancy wheels and exhaust. I said, “Make them fancy. Slap some STi stuff on it. The power, they can get afterward, put a shiny exhaust on it, a louder exhaust. You’ll sell it as a package.”
And most importantly, you have these nice LCD screens everywhere now. I said, get one of your programmers in his or her spare time to pull all the CAN bus data and if you buy the STi package, you can pick whatever gauges you want from the CAN bus data to put it on all the screens.
So hopefully some of the stuff will make it. They were ecstatic to get a different perspective from performance oriented Subaru drivers, and I said, “Well, that’s why they sent me.”
Q: That sounds like a fun trip. When do you get to go back?
A: In 2026 we will be returning to Fuji Speedway for the Super Taikyu 24 hour endurance race with Subaru, which will prove to be a great experience.
Paisan!
The coolest thing about Mike and Ryan is that they will explain the timing and scoring process to people who have questions. They’ve been doing this for almost two decades and there’s a sound reason for this system. Working with the backend software that is OLDER than a good number of the event participants is a challenge in itself and they do a great job.