Judy Blue

What is the ideal interior light in your race car's cockpit? It’s not red. It’s not even white. It’s the color that doesn’t affect your ability to focus down the track, provides the best peripheral vision and has the potential to highlight important controls. Electron Speed has put this into a robust, easy to mount package!

When my father was on reconnaissance missions, he used a red flashlight to read the maps. This used the red sensitive central portion of his vision. Generally, when you are "focused" on something (reading etc.), you look at the object with the center of your eye. This also left his night sensitive peripheral vision well adapted to the dark. This is important when you never know which shrub or boulder is really the enemy.

There is a trend in the aviation industry toward using a very dim, broad spectrum light in the cockpits at night. As airliners rely more and more heavily on instrumented flight and autopilots, being able to focus on all of the controls without color shifts becomes more important than focusing on the nothingness of the night sky.

However, when racing with your "eyes up", you are focusing down the track at the location you hope to be in another few seconds. We are trained to look where we want to go. At night we have two options. You can get military training to NOT focus on what you want to see allowing you to use more night sensitive peripheral vision. Or, you can minimize the impact that your interior lamp has on the central portion of your vision.

If you have to squint and focus on your controls, you are not focusing on a quick lap time. Matching the Judy Blue Lamp with our Fluorescent labels allow you to easily identify key controls with your peripheral vision, while maintaining a low level of general illumination.

Therefore, if we are trying to choose a lamp to illuminate a dash at night, we would use the lamp that leaves the focused, central portion of your vision best adapted to the dark, leaves as much of the portion of the vision that is responsible for color unaffected, highlights the important controls, and allows us to use generally dimmer light for issues inside the cockpit.

With this system, the driver is encouraged to keep his eyes on the track while keeping track of the controls!  Even at night.

Eyes up!