Brad Philpot breaks the 17-year Sutton Circuit lap record (and we proved his real time)

We don't often get to say this, so we'll enjoy it. One of our own has just rewritten the record books.

Brad Philpot, racing driver and a Racing Director here at Race Ninja, has broken the lap record at Sutton Circuit in Leicester. A record that had stood for seventeen years. And he did it with Race Ninja running on his data the whole way.

Seventeen years, beaten by a hundredth

The number to beat was 30.02 seconds, a time that had stood unbeaten for seventeen years. To take it on, the BPR Motorsport team put Brad in a brand-new OTK KZ shifter kart, around 50 horsepower against the 10 of the circuit's rental karts. A very different animal.

It didn't come easy. Brad started out learning the track in a rental kart, lapping around 40 seconds while he read the racing lines and braking points, including a nasty off-camber double-right at the end. In the KZ his first laps sat in the 33s. Revving the engine harder, plus a fuel tweak, brought him down to a 31.15. Fresh tyres and some setup changes took him to a 30.06, four hundredths off the record.

Then, fighting serious neck fatigue from the G-forces, he went out one last time and put it on the board. A 30.009. The seventeen-year record was his, by about a hundredth of a second.

Then the data told the real story

Here's where it gets good for us. Brad shot this on a DJI camera, not a GoPro, and Race Ninja read the GPS telemetry straight from that footage. When Brad sat down with Race Ninja to go back through the session, the numbers didn't quite line up with the official timing. The track's system had merged a couple of his laps together, and in doing so it had quietly lost his quickest running of the day.

Start with the record lap itself. The official timing called it a 30.009. We measured it at 30.007. Two thousandths of a second apart, which tells you something about the level we operate at.

But the real find was the laps the official system never credited at all. Brad had actually gone round in 29.972, and then a 29.941. Comfortably under the 30-second barrier, twice, and quicker than the time going into the record book. The timing merged two laps and dropped them. Our data caught both.

So the record officially stands at 30.009. The fuller story, the one only the telemetry tells, is that Brad Philpot did a 29.941 at Sutton Circuit. That gap between the official number and the real one is exactly the kind of precision the platform is built for.

Why this one means a lot to us

Two reasons. First, Brad himself. He isn't just quick, he's a Racing Director helping shape the platform, the kind of person who makes Race Ninja better by using it hard and telling us straight what's missing. Watching him take a seventeen-year record with our data on his side, we couldn't be prouder. He's our first official Race Ninja lap record holder, and we doubt he'll be the last.

Second, the proof. Anyone can claim accuracy. It's rarer to get a moment where the official timing and your own data disagree, and yours turns out to be the more complete picture. Brad's run was exactly that. The same analysis that recovered his missing 29.941 is what turns your own GoPro footage into lap times you can actually trust.

Congratulations, Brad. From all of us. Now let's go find the next tenth.