From his vantage point in a glassed-in room high above Michigan International Speedway's start/finish line, Steve Lowery has a first-hand view of the evolution of NASCAR's timing and scoring.

To Lowery's left, there are two rows of scoring cards, electronic buttons and synchronized clocks, a system which NASCAR has used almost since the first race nearly 60 years ago. On the table directly in front of him is his Hewlett-Packard laptop, displaying the current race monitoring system, which uses electronic scoring loops embedded in the track's surface and transporters on each car to track running order. And down below, in the window of every Craftsman Truck Series vehicle, is what could wind up being the scoring system of the future -- a global positioning system and wireless connection that could determine the location of a car to within one centimeter.

As Sprint Cup chief scorer since 2002, Lowery has one of the most critical -- and stressful -- jobs in NASCAR.

"When things go right, there doesn't seem to be anything to it," Lowery said. "But if it's not going right, it could be very stressful and about the only time you hear anything is when something goes wrong."

And because NASCAR has several backup systems in place, things don't go wrong very often.

The past

From the beginning, races were scored by hand, by writing down the number of each car as it crossed a reference point on the track. That sounds simple in theory, but as races became longer, including more pit stops and lapped cars, the need for a quick and comprehensive way to determine the running order became evident.

And for years, that was accomplished by scoring cards and a single clock that was started at the moment the green flag dropped. And you might be surprised to know, even with the ability to access telemetry via transponders, the human element is still very much evident in every Sprint Cup race.

Every race is still hand-scored, but the data is now used mainly as a backup for the electronic transponder-scoring loop system.

Each team supplies a scorer for its car at every track -- which equates to 43 scorers for a typical race. They sit together in a location with a view of the track's start/finish line. And it's their job to methodically enter handwritten data every time that car crosses the start/finish line.

Lowery said before the start of each race, each scorer is furnished with a lap card and a synchronized clock. In addition, scorers have a button in front of them that they press when the car they are following crosses the start/finish line, which sends an electronic signal to a recording device. That modification was added in the 1980s.

"A card has anywhere from 250 to 500 blocks, depending upon the number of laps [of the race]," Lowery said. "When the car goes by, whatever time that's on the clock, they just write it in the next available block."

By checking the cards at 10-lap intervals, Lowery and his staff can immediately spot any discrepancies between the electronic and hand scoring

"Once the race starts, starting at the first lap, every time their car goes by, they'll push the button and write the time that's on the clock," Lowery said. "It's basically giving you a point to start looking if you have a problem.

"Even now, we do a 10-lap rundown, sort of updating everything every 10 laps on paper. So if you do have a problem, you can just go back and figure it out within that 10-lap segment."

You might think a track like Daytona or Talladega, with cars running three- and four-wide, would be difficult to score. On the contrary, Lowery said. The hardest race is Bristol, where cars are turning four laps a minute under green-flag conditions.

"Bristol is probably the hardest, because you've got 43 cars turning laps every 14, 15 seconds during the race," he said. "It's tricky."

Lowery started scoring races back in the mid-'70s, helping then-chief scorer Morris Metcalfe. He became chief scorer for the Busch Series when Metcalfe retired, then took over the Cup Series from Tim Hudson six years ago.

Even then, it sometimes took as much as an hour for NASCAR's scorers to compile an official race report, which had to be typed by hand.

Because the transponders are 14 feet, two inches from the nose of the car, the transponder data in a side-by-side finish -- as was the case in the Craftsman Truck Series race at Michigan -- may not match the photos taken by the high-speed cameras that are focused on the finish line.

With the improvement of electronic devices with the ability to transmit real-time data from inside the cars, NASCAR's timing and scoring system took a huge leap forward in the last few years. Now with electronic wires imbedded in the track and transponders located on each car, scoring data can be compiled and displayed instantly.

"There's loops around the track, anywhere from six loops up to 20-something loops," Lowery said. "And now what we do differently, just in the last few years since we now freeze the field, is go back to the last passed loop from that car and get your lineup for the restarts or where the car was frozen at. It's easier in one way but tougher in another."

The scoring loop system allows NASCAR officials to determine the exact running order at any scoring loop. That allowed for the elimination of the "racing back to the caution" rule in 2003 -- which also makes Lowery's job more difficult, especially when there's a crash during a green-white-checkered finish.

"Before freezing the field, we only had one reference point," Lowery said. "If you didn't cross the start/finish line, it just didn't matter [where you wound up in the running order]. Where now you have up to 20 loops that would affect the finish."

The transponders are located near the fuel cell -- and are in the same place on every car. But that also creates additional problems.

First, cars with pit stalls that straddle the start/finish line can sometimes fool the system into scoring an extra lap for that car. Lowery said that's easily taken care of by matching the electronic and hand scoring -- and making corrections to the data.

Second, because the transponders are 14 feet, two inches from the nose of the car, the transponder data in a side-by-side finish -- as was the case in the Craftsman Truck Series race at Michigan -- may not match the photos taken by the high-speed cameras that are focused on the finish line.

Still, the positives of the transponder-scoring loop system well outweigh the negatives, particularly when it comes to providing real-time scoring charts for teams on pit road and in the garage area, logging lap speeds and providing new statistical measurements. And for Lowery, the tedious job of creating official race reports is a thing of the past.

"Now it's all computerized," Lowery said. "[With hand scoring], you could probably figure about an hour after the race, you'd have it. Now, it's within 10 minutes."

Lowery said if the scoring tower loses power, backup generators are in place. So there are safeguards to make sure each race is scored accurately.

"We have a main system which is the transponders," he said. "Then we have another system basically that works off the transponders, and then scorecards from the individual teams. So we have about three to four backup systems in case one does go out, we have something to look at."

The future

So what's the next big advance in timing and scoring?

If Todd Follmer has his way, it will be GPS units, similar to the ones that help fans navigate the roads to and from the track each weekend.

Follmer, chief executive officer of inthinc, is partnering with NASCAR on an innovative program to count laps using global positioning and wireless communication. The "tiwi" units are currently undergoing testing in the Nationwide and Craftsman Truck series.

Follmer said his company, which has been providing battery-powered crash data recorders to NASCAR since 2001, has pioneered a driver monitoring system for passenger vehicles. And it only seemed logical to take that device and find another application.

"Using that technology, we saw an application to do lap counting for NASCAR," Follmer said. "We have something called 'way-smart zones' spread out around the track, and the cars enter and leave the zones, and we can see that on the portal. These units actually count the laps internally and send us a notification every time the car has completed a lap."

Follmer said the units are mounted behind the windshield and turned on just before the race begins.

"We have a bracket. It opens up and you slide it in," he said. "We now have a pin in the charging port. When the pin's pulled, the system is on.

"We have three LEDs on the front of the box that show GPS lock, power on and wireless connection. These are on the Sprint connection here [at Michigan]. So there's a cellular modem in there, there's a GPS, there's a central processor, there's memory and it's the same unit that we sell for commercial applications.

The basic system for NASCAR just has GPS and a cell modem, so we're just using the Sprint public network here to transmit the data back to our portal. Generally, we'll pull the pins when they're out on pit road before the race. Then we have our computer and watch them come up on their portal, making sure they're talking with the portal and then we'll go on with the race."

The GPS units determine their position just like any global positioning device. Then the data is compared to a map downloaded into each unit.

"It's looking for as many satellites as it can see, every time," Follmer said. "It needs a minimum of four satellites to determine its location. Here, it's getting eight, nine or 10. The fewest we've seen is four at Bristol, because of the banking and the stands. But we got four everywhere.

"This unit right now is sensing its location one time per second. Then it looks to see 'way-smart zones' -- geographic zones that we've actually drawn in a map and downloaded into the unit. So it looks at 'where am I, what zone am I in.' So as it goes from zone to zone, as it completes a lap, it sends a notification to the portal, saying 'I just completed a lap.' And we're able to calculate the passing time -- when did it go across the start/finish line, what was the last lap time? And something we've just instituted is we're able to look at locations that were reported on each lap. So we can click on a lap in our portal and look at every location that the location reported in on the last lap."

Follmer said the next step for the project is to increase the unit's efficiency and accuracy.

"The next step is a GPS module to go in this that we'll be testing probably in about two weeks," he said. "The initial project for NASCAR was just to count laps. The next generation is actually going to report its location at up to 50 times per second, at centimeter accuracy. There's a lot of other stuff you'll be able to do with that data, and that's where the project's going."

What that means, according to Follmer, is that timing and scoring could conceivably have a record of the exact location of every car in any instant in time, rendering scoring loops obsolete.

"We'll be able to do positioning on the track to one centimeter accuracy," Follmer said. "It's as if you had an infinite number of loops in the track. They can freeze the field in their actual location instead of 'when did they pass the last loop?' If there was a change in position between the loops, we would be able to freeze the field anywhere on the track."

Follmer admits the system is still undergoing refinements.

"We found how we drew our zones around the track had some affect on our ability to count laps," Follmer said. "Going to the Sprint network for locations like this, you need to be on it, because of all the bandwidth they have here. And figuring out how to maintain that connection. It's challenging when we're not at a Cup race, because we're using the public network. Just getting the hardware to not reboot. Electronics can be temperamental. That can be an issue."

But Follmer said that's what makes it a challenge.

"It's a great test bed," he said. "To do it in a racecar at 200 mph, on tracks where you're constantly turning with a skyview that's impeded by the banking and the grandstands, it's a very challenging environment. It's one that we've taken advantage of to produce the best unit that we can. The public will benefit from that, because the units will be that much more reliable."

If GPS scoring becomes reliable enough to be implemented, it could finally spell the end of hand scoring.

"The big advantage of this system is to be able to eventually eliminate the manual scoring," Follmer said. "That's a very costly system. Every team has to send a scorer to timing and scoring. That's obviously very expensive to get people to the track for every race.

"Then there's the space that timing and scoring occupies in the grandstand in closed suites. And NASCAR obviously has to manage that. There's a great benefit for the teams, great benefit for the tracks and a great benefit for NASCAR."

In any case, it all comes back to Lowery, his staff, the scorers, the programmers and the engineers. Because without accurate timing and scoring, it really is just a bunch of cars going around in circles.