The Race Ninja app is open. Your phone carries the footage, we do the thinking

The Race Ninja app is open to everyone. iPhone, iPad, and any Mac with Apple silicon. It's free to join through Apple's TestFlight, and you can be in it in about two minutes.

But I want to be straight about what it is, because it's not what most racing apps are.

Why it doesn't process on your phone

Most lap apps do everything on the device. That's fine for a lap time. It isn't fine for what we do. A phone in a hot paddock can't run the vision models, the corner analysis and the coaching that turn a session into something you can act on. Not at the accuracy we work to, and not without cooking the battery.

So we split the job. The app is the courier. Race Ninja is the brain. That's what we mean by Racing Intelligence.

What happens to your footage

Your GoPro or DJI records a 10-minute session as several gigabytes. The app compresses it on the phone to a few hundred megabytes, keeping the GPS and motion data the camera wrote and barely touching the picture. Then it uploads over whatever signal the paddock gives you. If the connection drops, it picks up where it left off.

Once it lands, a lot of compute at Google Cloud gets to work. Custom algorithms find every lap and sector. Our own vision models read the footage. The data gets enriched with things like weather and track layout before any of it reaches you. You can put the phone away the moment the upload's done.

The results come back typically in about a minute per lap. Lap times and sectors, your strongest corners and your weakest, coaching notes, and every lap as its own video synced to the data.

Between sessions, not on the drive home

This is the whole point. Upload after practice, look at what the data says before you go back out, change something, go again. Several times a day.

Say you're three tenths down in sector two after first practice. You'll know where and why while the kart's still warm, not on Monday. That's the difference a minute a lap makes.

Getting it

Install Apple's TestFlight app, then open the Race Ninja beta link on the device you want it on. Sign in with your Race Ninja account, or make one. Same account and same plan as the website.

On a Mac you'll need Apple silicon (M1 or newer) and macOS 14 or later. Intel Macs can't run it. There's more on the downloads page.

The App Store version follows once Apple signs it off. Your TestFlight install just keeps updating until then, and if something breaks, tell us. Screenshots straight from TestFlight are perfect.