Crew Chief AI Advisor

The Crew Chief is an AI-powered advisor that has access to your real data -- service history, tire status, brake pads, parts inventory, alignment, suspension, track days, and session performance. It gives specific, actionable advice instead of generic answers.

Where to find the Crew Chief

You can access the Crew Chief in two ways:

• Dedicated page -- Navigate to Crew Chief in the sidebar for the full chat with your recent conversations. Ask Crew Chief on a car's page opens it scoped to that car.
• Slide-over panel -- On a phone or tablet, tap the amber Crew Chief button in the top bar, beside +, to open a chat panel without leaving your current view. The panel stays open as you browse.

That top-bar button is on every page, so you can ask a quick question without navigating away from the car, inventory, event, or schedule you are reviewing.

Conversations

The Crew Chief keeps a history of your conversations. On the dedicated page, the Recent rail lists your conversations and past Deep Research reports, newest first, each with its car (or Research) and when you last talked. Click a conversation to resume it, or New chat to start fresh. A research report opens its report page.

Scoping to a car

The chip at the top right shows the car a chat is about, and the composer reads Ask about that car. Clear it with its ×, or pick a car from All cars when there is none. Opening a car-scoped conversation brings its car back into the chip.

Ask and Research

The Ask / Research switch beside the title sets how Crew Chief answers. Research digs deeper, the way Deep Research does, and is available on the Club, Pro and Factory plans; on the free plan the switch offers an upgrade instead.

A new chat in Research mode has its own starting prompts -- brake pad and tire comparisons, upgrade value -- and the page address ends in ?mode=research, so you can bookmark or share a link that opens Crew Chief straight into Research.

Sources and next steps

When an answer leans on your own records, the line above it says what it read (for example "Crew Chief · using Silver's maintenance and sessions") and a sources card below lists them -- a tracker, a session note, a part. Click a source to open it on the car -- including in a garage-wide conversation, when you asked from a car's page. Answers can end in actions:

• Add to booking (for example "Add to Oct 9 booking") adds the recommended work to a visit you have already booked, on the same day, time and shop. A visit holds up to 10 pieces of work. It refuses work that already has its own booking -- a Saturday brake job stays on Saturday instead of jumping onto another visit.
• Book a tracker that is due soon or overdue with nothing booked yet opens the booking form for it: the day, and optionally a time, the shop, the place, and a note -- the same form as the Service page. Once it is booked, the button goes away.
• Log a service opens the service form with the tracker it resets already chosen.
• Add to-do adds a short prep task the answer suggests -- like "Pack Set B" -- to the car's to-dos in one tap.
• Save to Notes saves the answer to the car's Notes.

Actions are suggestions: nothing is booked, logged or added until you tap one.

On mobile, tap the chat icon in the top-left to open your conversation list as a slide-over sheet.

What the Crew Chief can do

Remember your preferences and car goals

Crew Chief automatically keeps useful notes from your conversations so you do not need to repeat yourself in every chat. Driver preferences can include your comfort with DIY work, experience, and priorities. Car notes can include a build goal, a recurring observation, or an upgrade you are considering.

For example, tell it: "I do routine maintenance myself, but prefer a shop for suspension work" or "Keep the Miata comfortable enough to drive to track days." A Memory saved notice shows the note it saved. Tentative observations are labeled Tentative rather than presented as something you explicitly said.

You can manage these notes directly in chat:

• "What do you remember about my preferences?"
• "What do you remember about the Miata?"
• "Update my preference: I now do brake work myself."
• "Forget my old budget preference."

Memory notes save automatically, without a confirmation card. They are separate from cards on your car's Notes board; ask Crew Chief to create a car note when you want a saved document there. Changes to car notes, maintenance rules, checklists, and vehicle records still require confirmation. If memory cannot be updated, Crew Chief shows that the update failed and you can ask again.

In the background, Crew Chief periodically reviews recent conversations to find useful observations, combine overlapping notes, and update outdated ones. It processes active accounts at most daily; there is no need to leave a chat open. This starts with conversations after memory becomes available, rather than rereading your entire conversation history.

Your current vehicle records remain the source of truth. Discussing a possible upgrade does not record it as installed or log a service.

Forgetting removes a note from future memory and prevents older messages from restoring it during background processing. It does not erase the text of your conversation. Deleting a conversation stops its pending memory processing, but does not automatically remove notes already learned from it; ask Crew Chief to forget those separately.

Answer questions about your cars

The Crew Chief looks up your actual data before answering. Ask things like:

• "What maintenance is coming up on my E46?"
• "What's due on the E46?"
• "When did I last change the oil?"
• "What tires are on the car right now and how much tread is left?"
• "What's my current alignment setup?"
• "Which car needs service soonest?"
• "Show me all my brake pad replacements this year"
• "What suspension am I running on the Miata?"
• "When does my insurance expire on the M3?"
• "Show my detailing history for the last year"
• "What part groups do I have set up for this car?"
• "Pull up the receipts attached to the front brake rotors"
• "Give me the full timeline for the front-left tire"
• "How have those Hawk DTC-60s held up over time?"
• "Which MotorsportReg events am I registered for?"
• "What's the weather forecast for my next registered event?"
• "Should I plan for rain at this weekend's track day I'm registered for?"
• "Show me the laps and tire readings from my last session at Summit Point"
• "Summarize today's track day and tell me what to check before the next session"
• "Review this session and suggest one thing to focus on next"
• "Give me a briefing on Road Atlanta -- layouts, turns, community notes"

When a tire has a long mount history, Crew Chief works from the most recent mounts, events, and notes and tells you when that list is not the full lifetime.

Asking what's due looks up every tracked maintenance item on that car -- engine oil, brake fluid, and similar -- and reports used vs. limit on each interval, whether the item is ok, due soon, due, overdue, or never logged, plus next due and last service. It also names every due reminder, tire set near its heat-cycle limit, expiring safety gear, and pads that need attention, each with its remaining figure (for example 520 mi over or 4.5 mm, 17% of usable pad left). While that lookup runs, the chat shows Checking what's due. The same list lives on the car Overview as Oil, fluids, and intervals -- Manage (or any row) opens Maintenance → Service schedule, where you log it. See Overview.

Provide expert advice

Ask for recommendations on maintenance schedules, track day preparation, tire selection, brake upgrades, suspension tuning, and more. The Crew Chief combines your car's data with motorsport expertise to give tailored advice. Example prompts:

• "What should I check before my first HPDE?"
• "Is it time to replace my brake pads based on my track day usage?"
• "Recommend a tire pressure starting point for a 200-treadwear tire at Watkins Glen"
• "What alignment changes would help with understeer in slow corners?"
• "Create a pre-track-day checklist for my car"

Search and create car notes

The Crew Chief can search active notes for a car, read a matching note, and cite it with a link that opens that exact note. Results show readable dates such as Updated Sep 10, 2026 so you can judge how current the source is. Try:

• "What did I write about wet tire pressures on the Miata?"
• "Find my latest brake-bedding note"
• "Save a note called Wet setup with these pressures"

Creating a note always opens a Create note confirmation with the car, title, and full note text. Archived notes remain indexed for restoration but are excluded from Crew Chief's active-note searches. Uploaded files are available through the car’s Documents library, described below.

Ask about saved documents

Keep manuals, tuner recommendations, observations, and reference files in your car's Maintenance → Documents. Choose Ask Crew Chief on a file to discuss that source, or ask about its contents in a fresh conversation -- you do not need to remember its filename or upload it again. Answers link back to the document and identify the relevant page, section, lines, or rows when available.

You can also attach a file in chat. Select its car first, tap the paperclip, choose Upload document, and ask your question. The file is saved to that car's Documents and remains there if you delete the conversation. If processing is still running, your question waits for the file before Crew Chief answers.

Supported files include PDF, JPEG, PNG, WebP, HEIC, Markdown, plain text, CSV, JSON, and DOCX, up to 25 MB each. PDFs can contain up to 200 pages. Files show Processing, Ready for Crew Chief, Needs more information, or Couldn't process. A failed file remains available to download or retry.

Crew Chief can inspect original PDF/image diagrams and perform basic numeric column calculations over CSV/JSON records. Explain channel names and units when they are missing. Proprietary tuner files and a general telemetry analysis engine are outside this document feature. Ready means the file is usable as reference material, not that every measurement has been interpreted.

Documents are private to their owner and are not included in shared car profiles. Replacing or deleting a file changes what future lookups can use; old messages remain in your conversation history.

Fleet-wide insights

The Crew Chief can look across all your cars at once:

• Compare tire wear or parts status across your fleet
• Identify which car needs attention first
• Summarize track day history across multiple cars
• Find trends in your session performance

Example: "Compare tire tread depth across all my cars" or "Which car has the most track days this season?"

Create maintenance rules

Ask the Crew Chief to set up recurring maintenance schedules. For example:

• "Set up an oil change every 5,000 miles or 6 months"
• "Add a brake fluid flush every 12 months"
• "Create a complete maintenance schedule for a 2015 Mazda MX-5"

The Crew Chief proposes the rule and asks you to confirm before creating it. A confirmation card appears in the chat with the rule name, service type, mileage interval, and time interval. Review the details and tap Confirm or Decline.

Manage checklists, maintenance rules, and alignments

Beyond creating new records, the Crew Chief can tidy up existing ones. These vehicle and checklist changes ask for confirmation first -- nothing changes until you tap Confirm. Examples:

• "Check off 'torque lug nuts' on my pre-track list"
• "Add 'verify tire pressures' to the pre-track checklist"
• "Archive last weekend's pre-track list once we're done"
• "Pause the oil-change rule for the winter" or "Resume it in April"
• "Update the brake-fluid rule to every 18 months"
• "Delete the old coolant-flush rule -- I replaced it with a new one"
• "Log today's alignment: camber -2.5 front, -1.8 rear, toe zeroed out"
• "Mark that new alignment as the active setup"
• "Mark the brake-pad inspection reminder as complete at 22,400 miles"

When a service reminder is tied to an active maintenance rule, completing it automatically schedules the next one based on the rule's interval. When a reminder is At the shop, Crew Chief reports that drop-off instead of calling the work overdue, and does not tell you to book it.

Confirmation cards appear for checklist edits, alignment changes, maintenance-rule updates, reminder completions, receipt-to-service conversion, and destructive vehicle-record actions like deletes. Memory notes are the exception: Crew Chief maintains those automatically. The card uses plain-language labels, formatted dates, distances, dollars, and service-type names so you can review what will change before approving it. General checklists can be confirmed even when no car is selected.

After you tap Confirm or Decline, the card is removed from the thread so completed proposals do not pile up in the conversation.

If a confirmation fails, the error appears in the chat banner and the thread stays available so you can retry or decline the action.

Process receipts

Select the receipt’s car, tap the paperclip icon in the chat input, and choose Upload receipt. The Crew Chief reads the extracted data (vendor, date, cost, line items) and can convert it into a service record for your car. The confirmation card shows the proposed service record details -- name, service type, cost, mileage, vendor, and date. You confirm before anything is saved.

Search documentation

The Crew Chief can search TrackOut's documentation to answer questions about app features and how things work. Ask things like "How do I import a CSV maintenance schedule?" or "How does tire wear tracking work?"

Suggested prompts

When you start a new conversation, the Crew Chief shows a set of action tiles plus a separate Try asking list tailored to your current context:

After each response, the Crew Chief suggests follow-up questions based on the conversation.

Working with answers

Each Crew Chief response includes quick actions for common follow-up work:

• Copy -- Copy the answer so you can paste it into notes, a message, or a checklist.
• Like -- Mark an answer as useful feedback.

Tool activity indicator

While the Crew Chief is working, a status indicator shows which tools it is using -- for example, "Looking up car details," "Checking service history," or "Checking what's due." When no specific tool is active, the thinking state shows that the Crew Chief is receiving signal. This lets you know the AI is pulling real data, not guessing.

When an answer doesn't arrive

Answers stream in from a background job, so on rare occasions one never starts -- a dropped connection or a hiccup on our side. Rather than leaving you watching the thinking indicator, the Crew Chief gives up after about 30 seconds and replaces it with a short notice and a Try again button that re-sends your last question exactly as you wrote it. Your question stays in the conversation either way, so nothing is lost.

If a reply starts and then drops mid-stream, Crew Chief retries that turn once on its own before showing the unfinished-answer notice. The dropped attempt is discarded, so a failed retry does not leave a second bubble with the unfinished text.

Confirmation for write actions

The Crew Chief never modifies your data without asking first. When it wants to create, update, complete, archive, pause, resume, or delete something, a confirmation card appears in the chat with the proposed details. You must tap Confirm to proceed or Decline to cancel.

Confirm applies the change to the car the Crew Chief proposed -- even if you have since opened a different car.

The chat controls are built for keyboard and touch use: focus rings are visible, icon buttons have large tap targets, and the mobile conversation sheet can be dismissed with Escape or by tapping outside it.

Subscription tiers

The Crew Chief is available on every plan. Club and Pro plans upgrade to a smarter AI model and add web search. The Factory plan uses the smartest and most capable model, so the Crew Chief can reason more deeply and look up current parts, pricing, and technical references on your behalf.