The plan

Firstly, if you’re reading this, thank you. I appreciate that this little side project has taken off enough that someone might consider reading a little blog post.

At time of writing, it’s worth noting what I’ve been up to. Effectively, empowered creatively by the advent of pretty-good-at-coding AI, I’ve been vibe coding Outlap as a kind-of niche addressed solution to the problem of providing an all-in-one platform for folks interested in grassroots motorsports.

It started as a very specific AI companion for folks who wanted to participate in races or track days at Mondello Park in Ireland. But with AI, I got a bit more ambitious and decided to blow it out and be more general for an entire industry. Which leaves me with 3 core personas: those who want to go to track days and get setups, measure performance, etc., those who are organising clubs and those who want to organise an event with race controls, etc.

It means the platform is a bit of a hodge-podge of features right now, but those features are working well. The issue with the UX and flow is basically down to my lack of ability!

If this were to ever take-off, and frankly that would require more time and some money for marketing, I would love to see it evolve into:

• A small, but fully-fledged company that can self-sustain itself.
• Have proper marketing and brand awareness, design, etc.
• Support event creation, organisation and clubs. Both by having best-in-class software to orchestrate motorsports. But also, if it took off enough, to be a platform that can issue capital to local tracks, events, etc. in order to support grassroots growth in a very niche industry.
• Develop wholly-owned LLM foundation models to better provide engineering guidance to drivers, strategists, and more at a professional grade.
• A company doing hardware, ideally by collaborating with talented folks like Teenage Engineering, to develop the kind of hardware a prosumer driver or track day warrior could use to integrate to the platform for lap timing, stats, etc. etc.
• Something that can develop into an enterprise-grade, professional platform that could be used by the biggest and best teams, drivers and race series.

I want to write and publish this to act as a bit of a manifesto for the future. I’ll keep writing about the journey, which to-date has been quite a technical journey of developing and building out features. Stick with me!