We've seen Windows Phone in space, now we can see it being used in a full on rally race. Evidently, 10 cars in the Rallye International de Bourgogne for 2011 will be sportin' a Windows Phone with custom GPS tracking software. Reason? So you can follow where the cars are on the live Bing maps, of course. Granted, there are a 120 cars involved, so 10 is but a drop in the bucket, but with distributing the phones according to "the top seed in the back of the pack", there should be a relatively even distribution amongst all the racers.
The race evidently will run for two days and instead of having the phones plugged in (what, no cigarette lighters in rally cars?), the phones will be running with the screen off and all services turned off except phone and data. The phones are reportedly HTC Mozarts running NoDo (guess they couldn't get dev unlocked).
Anyways, it sounds like a cool use of GPS, Windows Phone and custom software by Vivien Chevallier and we look forward to seeing how the whole experiment works out.
Read more at MonSmartphone (French) and follow the race here with the Live Map. (Thanks, Michael B., for the heads up!)
