{"podcast":{"title":"The PolicyViz Podcast","slug":"the-policyviz-podcast-1096919","podcast_index_feed_id":1096919,"rss_url":"https://feeds.zencastr.com/f/-k6yUlMb.rss","website_url":"https://policyviz.com/podcast/","image_url":"https://media.zencastr.com/image-files/5a0b59c06ebaa2000f259f8d/7af84444-9451-4413-b319-45f8ad09ca6d.png","author":"The PolicyViz Podcast","episode_count":311,"summary":"Learn how to be a great data communicator and visualizer with host Jon Schwabish. Hear from experts in the fields of data science, data visualization, and presentation skills to improve how you and your organization collect, analyze, and communicate your data in better, more efficient, and more effective ways.","last_synced_at":null,"page_url":"https://stenobird.com/podcast/the-policyviz-podcast-1096919"},"episode":{"title":"From PDFs to Pit Lane: Building a Real-Time Data Product for McLaren Racing","slug":"from-pdfs-to-pit-lane-building-a-real-time-data-product-for-mclaren-racing","published_at":"2026-03-11T04:05:00+00:00","page_url":"https://stenobird.com/podcast/the-policyviz-podcast-1096919/from-pdfs-to-pit-lane-building-a-real-time-data-product-for-mclaren-racing","show_page_url":"https://stenobird.com/podcast/the-policyviz-podcast-1096919","url":"https://zencastr.com/z/pkEOsWNO","audio_url":"https://redirect.zencastr.com/r/episode/69a9abb1cb2a6819685b0f68/size/55173334/audio-files/5a0b59c06ebaa2000f259f8d/598190a8-bf59-41a9-b86a-c66d5bb006cb.mp3","summary":"In this week's episode of the PolicyViz Podcast, I chat with Michael Gethers, former Head of Data & Strategy for the McLaren IndyCar team, about how a personal side project analyzing IndyCar timing PDFs turned into a job building real-time data tools for a professional race team. We dig into what it's like to design data products for engineers, strategists, and drivers who need to understand information instantly while a car is on track. Michael shares how he moved from making public visualizations on Twitter to building an internal analytics application from scratch, why \"pretty charts\" weren't enough for the engineers, and how user feedback shaped the product. We also talk about race strategy as a probabilistic data science problem, the difference between dashboards and data products, and what he learned about designing for cognition under extreme time pressure. If you care about dashboards, data storytelling, or building tools people truly use, this conversation is a goldmine. Keywords: data dashboards, data product design, data visualization, motorsports analytics, race strategy, McLaren IndyCar, telemetry data, timing data, data science in sports, user centered design, dashboard design, real time analytics, D3 visualization, data engineering, analytics application Subscribe to the PolicyViz Podcast wherever you get your podcasts. Become a patron of the PolicyViz Podcast [https://patreon.com/policyviz?utm_medium=unknown&utm_source=join_link&utm_campaign=creatorshare_creator&utm_content=copyLink] for as little as a buck a month Follow me on Instagram [https://www.instagram.com/jschwabish/?hl=en], LinkedIn [https://www.linkedin.com/in/jonathanschwabish/], Substack [https://jschwabish.substack.com/], Twitter [https://twitter.com/jschwabish], Website [https://policyviz…","meta_description":"In this week's episode of the PolicyViz Podcast, I chat with Michael Gethers, former Head of Data & Strategy for the McLaren IndyCar team, about how a per…","key_points":[],"chapters":[],"topics":[],"duration_seconds":2231,"processing_state":"not_requested","actions":[{"name":"request_transcript","method":"POST","url":"https://stenobird.com/v1/public/podcasts/the-policyviz-podcast-1096919/episodes/from-pdfs-to-pit-lane-building-a-real-time-data-product-for-mclaren-racing/transcription-requests","description":"Idempotently request low-priority transcript generation for this episode."},{"name":"read_markdown","method":"GET","url":"https://stenobird.com/podcast/the-policyviz-podcast-1096919/from-pdfs-to-pit-lane-building-a-real-time-data-product-for-mclaren-racing.md","description":"Read the agent-friendly Markdown representation of this episode resource."}]}}