Former sports editor and island road racing authority John Watterson says the new digital leaderboard screens at the Grandstand are hard for fans to read...

John Atkinson of Ballabeg wrote to Media Isle of Man earlier this week to suggest that the company sent a reporter with 20-20 vision to the Grandstand to try to read the race progress illuminated displays.

He continued: ‘My friend and I asked around half a dozen folks, at the very front of the grandstand, if they could read the displayed names of the riders, their numbers and their progress during qualifying.

‘Not one person could do so, indeed the best could only positively discern approximately 10% of the display. Surely the text could be increased in size to help the race fans to keep abreast of the developing situation.?’

As it happens, my wife and I were invited as guest of Manx Motor Cycle Club to watch the action from the Grandstand on Saturday.

We had a wonderful day, but the one complaint that I (and several other people around us) had was the poor quality of the display screens.

I’d intended to sit down in a relaxed environment and glean regularly-updated information on the Supertwin and Supersport MGP races as the laps progressed, but it simply failed to supply sufficient information. When it did, at the end of each lap only, the read-out on the screens was so small that it was extremely difficult to read.

The old manually-operated scoreboards opposite the Grandstand were an iconic piece of the TT and Manx Grand Prix’s history.

Surveys and subsequent improvement works in 2018 only guaranteed that the structure was suitable and viable for use up until the end of the 2020 racing season, so the Department for Enterprise ran a public consultation to identify the longer-term options for the design of a replacement scoreboard structure.

The process identified a number of potential options with the route eventually identified to rebuild the structure with a combination of old and new technologies.

This included replacing leaderboard panels with digital screens and the linking sections with a traditional design.

So the old, traditional scoreboards were dismantled for the last time in 2020 and the new digital screens were wheeled in for the return of racing to the Mountain Course in 2022 after the enforced two-year break during the Covid pandemic.

At the time the decision was made to scrap the old boards they were described as no longer fit for purpose, but you have to ask if the so-called latest technology replacements are genuinely any better? The answer is a resounding no, especially if the bulk of the paying spectators in the Grandstand find them difficult to read and the leaderboard only changes once each lap with no updates from Glen Helen, Ramsey and the Bungalow as in the past.

It is ironic to think that a manually operated system designed and built more than a century ago, that was reliant on boy scouts and local painters and decorators to convey the information to the largest assembled crowd on the course, was infinitely superior to the modern digital system that superseded it.