With the exception of the New Jersey Motorsports Parks and the Circuits of the Americas of the world, most race tracks were designed before the Internet was a thing. This is a huge problem when you’re trying to report anything from said race track, or send cool pictures of your car back to Mom.
You see, “I have this great photo of a seagull nesting in Brendon Hartley’s hair, but my upload speeds are slower than an Amish buggy with a dead horse” is a real, and horrible thing. There’s nothing more frustrating than having neat stuff to post in a timely fashion on a connection that keeps getting overloaded by too many users and dropping out for agonizingly long periods of time.
Historic tracks often do a better job of being awesome than they do with that whole “series of tubes” thing. I’ve even seen routers housed in bizarrely exposed outdoor cabinets, for Pete’s sake. No wonder the signal gets munched.
So, I’ve come up with more appropriate names than “PublicInternet,” “Track_LowerGarage” or “Press_Room_1” for the track wifi signal that more accurately describes their lack of speed and tendency to fail.
- SpoiledBanana
- stunt_and_splode
- Crashtor_Wifi
- NoPostingAllowed
- CarrierPigeon
- non-deadline-media-only
- LeMans_Ferrari_In_The_Way
- ranchdressingoneverything
- RenaultPowerUnit_3
- Alt+F4
- We Gave Brad Keselowski A Hammer To Fix This Connection
- Hispania_Internet_Team
- PorscheCoolant917
- Bandwidth Exceeds 107 Percent
- sad-mushy-brown-guacamole
- only_cylinder_left
- vaporware_10
- wifi-reduction-system
Finding a strong wifi signal at the track is like finding an unmolested Evo for sale without the “adult owned” bump in price: very, very difficult. These connection names should make it a bit clearer as to the experience you’re really about to encounter while trying to upload sweet race footage to YouTube from on-site.
Contact the author at stef.schrader@jalopnik.com.