7.45 Dial for Bill O'Connor

[Dan Bennett]

That's a great shot that helps to understand what went on.

I don't know if it's a problem with the software that Larry Sullivan wrote or the way that the clocks work, but I can think of why the numbers say one thing and what happened on the track was something else.

When the operator loads the car numbers in and then the dial in, the clock program "completes" the pair and it's sent to the box that DRC had to buy to interface with the system. I've gotten tripped up when the operator goes back into the data entry to change something and then doesn't refresh their screen. When that happens, nothing changes on the DRC computer.

Dave would have had to know that a change had been made so he could manually (enter it as a new pair and then edit the wrong info out later) load the new info. And it's been a while since I worked Pomona, but I seem to remember that Control (where the race director and the clock operator sit) is a different room than the media center where DRC is set up. That's not always the case for a lot of tracks and it depends on where each track tells the reporter to be.