PassTech User Manual

Introduction

What is PassTech?

PassTech is a racer safety-equipment checker. You tell it what helmet, harness, HANS device, rollover cage, and other safety gear you have — certification standard, dates, material — and it checks that against the published tech-inspection rules of 50 rulesets across 11 disciplines: autocross, rallycross, rally, road racing, hillclimb, ice racing, endurance racing, HPDE/track day, drag racing, karting, and drifting.

The goal is to remove surprises at tech inspection. Racers who run with more than one club or series often own gear that clears one body’s rules but not another’s — a helmet rated for one sanctioning body might be a year past what a stricter one accepts, or a rollover cage built for road racing might not satisfy a hillclimb body’s tube-size rules. PassTech surfaces that mismatch before you tow to the track, not at tech.

Every result cites the specific rulebook section it came from and the date it was last reviewed, so you can go verify it yourself — PassTech is explicitly a pre-screening tool, not a substitute for the tech inspector’s own call on race day.

Four ways in

• Check the Rules — browse what a body requires, with no gear entry needed. A reference copy of the rulebook.
• Check my gear — build and save named gear sets in My Gear (Chapter 3) so you never have to re-type your equipment twice, then check any of them straight from its own row: Will My Equipment Pass Tech? against one specific sanctioning body, or Where Can My Equipment Race? against every body/discipline PassTech knows, all at once.
• Buyer mode — check a single piece of gear before you buy it, with no gear set to build or save — the single-item version of Where Can My Equipment Race?
• Scrutineer mode — pick a discipline, sanctioning body, and class once, then scan gear one item at a time for an instant pass/fail call — built for working tech inspection, not for entering your own gear.

Privacy & offline use

Everything you enter is saved only in your browser’s local storage — there is no account, no server, and nothing is ever transmitted anywhere. From the main menu you can install PassTech to your phone’s home screen or your desktop like a regular app, so it keeps working at the track with no signal — see Chapter 1 for step-by-step install instructions and exactly what does and doesn’t need a connection.

Chapter 1

Installing PassTech on Your Mobile Device

Installing PassTech on your phone or tablet turns it into a regular app icon on your home screen — and, more importantly, lets it keep working with no signal. Almost everything PassTech does runs entirely in your browser with no server involved, so once you’ve opened it while connected, the rules, your saved gear, and the checker itself all keep working at the track even with zero bars.

The exceptions are the AI-powered photo features — Automatic mode and certification-tag scanning — since those send your photo to Google’s Gemini vision API to read it, and any link that takes you off to a sanctioning body’s own website (a rulebook download, or some tech sheets). The table below spells out exactly what needs a connection and what doesn’t:

* A few tech sheets are hosted by PassTech itself and may already be available offline if you’ve viewed them before while connected; most link directly to the sanctioning body’s own site and always need a connection.
† Reading the codriver’s exported file back in doesn’t need a connection — but you need that file already on the device, which usually means receiving it (email, AirDrop, a shared drive) while you did have one.

Installing on Android

1. Open passtech.frogracing.us in your phone’s browser (Chrome or another Chromium-based browser).
2. Tap the three-dot menu at the top right of the browser.
3. Choose the install option — wording varies by Android version, but it’s something like Install app, Add to Home Screen, or Install and create shortcut on home screen.
4. Confirm when prompted. PassTech now opens from your home screen like any other app.

Installing on iOS (iPhone/iPad)

1. Open passtech.frogracing.us in Safari — this only works in Safari, not Chrome or another browser on iOS.
2. Tap the Share button (the square with an arrow pointing up) in the toolbar.
3. Scroll down and select Add to Home Screen.
4. Tap Add to confirm.

Chapter 2

Check the Rules

No gear entry needed. Pick a sanctioning body and discipline and browse exactly what it requires, what certifications it accepts, and any conditions — a reference copy of the rulebook, not a check against equipment you own.

Walkthrough

1. From the main menu, choose “Check the rules”.
2. Toggle Driver Safety Gear / Car Safety Gear / Rollover Protection at the top to focus on just the sections you care about — all three are on by default. This same row appears on every option in this manual, always in the same place.
3. Pick a discipline (step 1), then a sanctioning body within it (step 2) — two short dropdowns instead of one long list spanning every body across every discipline. Disciplines are listed alphabetically. E.g. pick Autocross, then SCCA Solo.
4. If that body defines its own competitor classes — AMEC’s Street Legal vs. Super Modified, SCCA Solo’s Street vs. Modified, an SCCA GCR class exemption — a Refine by class dropdown appears underneath. Pick yours and the rules sharpen to exactly that class; leave it on “All classes” for the general picture.
5. Click the blue Source line to download the official rulebook PassTech cited for this body and class.
6. The Equipment Summary panel at the top shows one line for every category this body marks Required, and one for every category marked Conditional — click any icon to jump straight to that category further down the page.

Reading a category card

Below the summary, every equipment category gets its own card: what the rule requires, why (in plain language), and the full list of certification standards this body accepts — each with its expiration rule (a fixed sunset date, a number of years from the label date, or no expiration at all).

Standards PassTech tracks for that category but this body’s rulebook doesn’t mention are collapsed under a red “Not accepted” panel — a quick way to spot a real gap in a rulebook versus a standard nobody happens to use anymore. Some categories — like the Seat card below — don’t trigger that panel at all, when every standard PassTech tracks for that category happens to be one this body accepts.

Many categories also show up to four small logos in the bottom corner of their card, always in the same order:

• — links to Frog Racing’s own write-up on that piece of gear.
• — links to a Frog Racing explainer video.
• — links to a good outside video that isn’t from Frog Racing.
• — links to a recommended product to buy the item.

A category shows only the logos it actually has — most have one or two, a few have all four, and some have none. These are optional research links only; none of them are printed on an exported PDF report. The same four logos appear the same way on Will My Equipment Pass Tech? and Where Can My Equipment Race?, next to whichever categories need your attention.

Download the rulebook

Every ruleset cites the actual source document PassTech built it from — the blue Source line just above the Equipment Summary panel. Click the rulebook title to open or download the real PDF (or web page) straight from the sanctioning body, alongside the date PassTech last reviewed it against that source. This line appears the same way in Check the Rules, Will My Equipment Pass Tech?, and Where Can My Equipment Race?, so you can always trace any result back to the actual rule it came from — and double-check it yourself, since PassTech is a pre-screening tool, not a replacement for reading the rulebook.

See the sample tech sheet

For bodies where PassTech has one on file, a separate box — View sample tech sheet — appears just below the Source box, in a different color so the two aren’t confused for one thing. This is different from the rulebook: it’s a copy of the actual checklist a tech inspector works from at the event, not the regulations themselves. It’s a reference sample only — the car number, event date, and other event-specific fields on it won’t match yours — but it’s a useful preview of what scrutineering actually looks like on the day. Not every body has one cached yet; the link simply doesn’t appear for the ones that don’t.

Exporting a PDF report

Download PDF report, at the bottom of the Equipment Summary panel, saves everything currently on screen as a printable PDF — the same requirement levels, plain-language notes, and citations you see on screen, laid out for printing or emailing rather than browsing. Every chapter that has this button (1, 2, and 5) exports exactly what that chapter is currently showing; here, that’s the reference rulebook for the body/class you picked, with no verdict since no gear has been entered.

Chapter 3

My Gear

This is where you enter your safety gear, then check it against a specific sanctioning body’s rules or see everywhere it’s eligible to race — saved here as a named gear set, so you never have to re-enter it.

Building a gear set

1. From the main menu, click Check my gear to open My Gear, then Add a new gear set.
2. Choose Automatic mode (upload photos of your gear and let PassTech read the tags — walked through in detail below) or Manual mode (enter everything yourself, category by category — Chapter 4 is the full field-by-field reference for that).
3. You’re now in the editor: give the set a name — a car, a driver, whatever tells your sets apart — and optionally attach a reference photo of the car and a free-text note (e.g. “2004 Miata NB, closed roof”). Whichever mode you started in, both stay available here: the Automatic-mode upload panel and the full manual category list sit in the same editor, so you can mix and match as you go.
4. Check Add codriver gear to add a second set of driver items for rally — or pull in a codriver’s own gear directly with Import codriver gear set from file, using the file they exported from their own PassTech.

Collapsing a section

A full driver-and-car gear set can run to twenty-plus category cards on one screen, so the editor groups them under Driver Safety Gear, Car Safety Gear, and Rollover Protection headers (plus Codriver Safety Gear when a codriver is on the car). Each group header collapses independently of the individual cards inside it — fold away a section you’re not touching right now to cut down the scrolling, and reopen it to get back to the cards inside.

Automatic mode

Choosing Automatic mode (or tapping Upload gear photos in the panel that’s always present in the editor) opens a file picker — select one photo or several at once, in any mix: whole-item shots, certification-tag close-ups, or both together.

PassTech reviews the photos one at a time. For each one it names what it detected and, when a certification tag is legible in the same shot, reads that too — here, a photo of a firesuit jacket correctly identified as a Firesuit / Driving Suit with its SFI 3.2A/5 tag read straight off the sleeve patch:

Tap Use this as the item photo and/or Use this — add as a certification to confirm what you want kept — you can take one, both, or neither before moving to Next photo. Everything you’ve confirmed so far stays listed as you go, across every photo you upload in that batch:

Tap Done — review/edit manually below when you’re through, and scroll down to the category list — confirmed items already show their photo and certification filled in, exactly as if you’d typed them in yourself:

Using a saved set

1. Under Available Gear Sets, each row shows a preview of the set’s own photos as small round thumbnails — car photo first, then firesuit, helmet, HANS/head-and-neck restraint, gloves, shoes, seat, and belts, whichever are present — with a “+N” badge for anything past the first three. Click any thumbnail to zoom it to full size.
2. Click anywhere else on the row to expand its actions: Edit this gear set, Export this gear set (clicking it asks Include high-resolution photos in the export? — choose No, keep it small unless you specifically need full-size photos in the file), and Delete this gear set (asks for confirmation once before permanently removing it). Below those, two larger boxes — Will my equipment pass tech? and Where can my equipment race? — load the set straight into either checker (Chapters 5 and 6); returning to My Gear from either one reopens this same set’s row automatically.
3. Inside the editor, ← Cancel discards anything changed since you opened it — it only asks you to confirm if you actually changed something. Update this gear saves and returns to the list; it lights up bright green once there’s something to save, and stays muted otherwise. Either way, you land back on this same set’s row, expanded.
4. The Import button on the main My Gear screen reads a file straight back in — from any device (email it to a codriver, AirDrop it, save it to Drive, however you’d normally send a file).

My preferred sanctioning bodies

If you mostly race with the same one or two sanctioning bodies, set that up once here instead of re-picking it every time. Expand My preferred sanctioning bodies on the main My Gear screen (above Available Gear Sets) to set two independent preferences:

1. Preferred setup for “Will my equipment pass tech?” — pick a discipline, sanctioning body, and (if the body has one) a class, the same three pickers as Chapter 5. Once set, Will my equipment pass tech? opens straight to this combination on any saved gear set instead of whatever was picked last. Clear preference removes it and goes back to remembering your last pick, same as before this setting existed.
2. Preferred sanctioning bodies for “Where can my equipment race?” — a finer filter than Chapter 6’s own discipline checkboxes, which can only include or exclude a whole discipline at once. Expand any discipline row here to see every individual sanctioning body PassTech checks in it, and uncheck the ones you don’t race with — useful when a discipline has several bodies but you only ever run with one of them. Select all / Deselect all appears both per discipline and once at the bottom for every discipline at once. Leaving a discipline fully checked keeps it “unrestricted,” meaning any body PassTech adds there later is automatically included too — only a discipline you’ve actually narrowed down stays fixed to the bodies you picked.
3. Once anything is narrowed down here, Where can my equipment race? shows a new Only show my preferred sanctioning bodies checkbox in place of the discipline checkboxes — on by default, so results already match your preferences the moment you open it. Uncheck it to fall back to the discipline checkboxes and see every sanctioning body again for that session, without having to come back here and change anything.
4. Once at least one discipline is narrowed down, every gear set in Available Gear Sets also starts checking its own items for expired or soon-to-expire certifications against just those preferred bodies. A collapsed gear set shows a single overall icon — ✋ (red) if a preferred body actually rejects something as expired, or ⚠️ (yellow) if the only concerns are softer than that. Expand the gear set to see one line per concern, listed above the Edit/Export/Delete buttons:
5. ✋ Expired, and rejected (red) — e.g. “Seat expired on 2024-12-31 with PCA Club Racing” — that body’s own rule actually fails the item for it.
6. ⚠️ Expired, but still accepted (yellow) — some bodies explicitly don’t enforce a given item’s expiration date (or grant a grace period past it); PassTech still flags the date for your own awareness, worded to make clear the item isn’t actually failing there.
7. ⚠️ One of several certifications expired (yellow) — an item like a helmet or HANS device with two certifications (e.g. Snell and FIA) only fails a body once every certification on it does. If one has expired but another is still valid, PassTech names the expired one and confirms the item is still accepted via the other — it never shows the red hand for an item that's still genuinely passing.
8. ⚠️ Expiring soon (yellow) — nothing has expired yet, but something will before the end of the current calendar year.

Chapter 4

The detailed reference for every field you see when you expand a category card in Will My Equipment Pass Tech?, Where Can My Equipment Race?, or My Gear — how certification entry works, what to do when one item carries more than one tag or a body’s requirement depends on your class or setup, how to photograph gear so a scan actually works, and exactly what happens (and where your photo goes) when you tap Scan tag photo.

How a category card works

Every category starts collapsed with a No data tag. Expand it and you’ll find, depending on the category: a style/type dropdown where one applies (helmet full-face vs. open-face, for instance), an optional photo-upload button, and either a certification picker or a simple material-vs-certified choice.

• Pure certification categories (helmet, head & neck restraint, neck collar, fire suppression, window net where certified, seat/harness/fuel cell where certified) always need a standard picked from the dropdown — there’s no “plain material” option because the rulebook itself doesn’t offer one.
• Hybrid categories (balaclava, firesuit, gloves, shoes, socks, undergarment, arm restraint, seat, belts/harness, window net, fuel cell) first ask whether your item is plain material/stock or certified. Pick No certification and you’re done — pick Certified and the same standard dropdown appears.
• Presence-only categories (fire extinguisher, window breaker, kill switch, tow hook, tow rope, emergency triangle, first aid kit, parachute) have no certification concept at all — most are a simple yes/no toggle. Fire extinguisher, window breaker, and emergency triangle instead let you add one entry per physical unit you actually carry, each with its own photos, and tow hook is a separate front/rear toggle pair — see each one’s own entry below.

Once you pick a standard, two optional date fields appear: manufacturing date on tag/label and expiration date on tag (only if the tag itself prints one). Leave either blank if your tag doesn’t show it — PassTech falls back to whatever expiration rule the sanctioning body publishes for that standard (a fixed sunset date, a number of years from the label date, or no expiration at all) when you leave the tag’s own expiration blank.

Below the entry fields, a small result strip shows the outcome for exactly what you’ve entered against the currently-selected body: green OK once an entered certification is accepted, or red with the specific reason (rejected standard, expired, or still no data) when it isn’t.

FIA homologation numbers

Several FIA-backed standards — 8855-2021 seats, 8856-2018 firesuits, 8860-2018 helmets, and others — are backed by an official FIA Technical List: the actual homologation register FIA publishes, naming every specific product approved to that standard. Pick one of these standards on a certification row and an extra field appears, FIA homologation number on tag, for the per-product registration number printed on the label (e.g. “DC.001.18-O”, “CS.001.21”) — distinct from the standard number itself.

Type the number in and PassTech checks it live against the real list, right there on the card:

• Found, valid — a green banner confirms the manufacturer/model and, when the list states one, the date it’s valid until.
• Revoked — a red banner: FIA has withdrawn this specific homologation. Not authorized regardless of the date on the tag.
• Expired — an amber banner: past the list’s own stated validity date.
• Not found — an amber banner: this number doesn’t appear on the list at all. Double-check for typos first; if it’s correct as entered, the product may not be genuinely FIA-homologated.

This field is entirely optional — leaving it blank never affects whether the item passes. It’s an extra layer of verification for standards where FIA maintains a real product registry, on top of the certification/date check every other standard already gets. Enter the number by hand, or let Scan tag photo read it off the label for you — either way the same live check runs. For the full current list of which FIA Technical Lists PassTech checks against, see Annex B.

Multiple certification tags on one item

Some single physical items legitimately carry more than one certification tag — a helmet with both a Snell and an FIA sticker, a two-piece firesuit whose jacket and pants each carry their own homologation label. Click + Add another certification to add a second (or third) entry to the same item instead of picking just one.

Enter every real tag you have, not just one — PassTech checks all of them against a body’s accepted list and counts the item as satisfied if any entered certification qualifies. A helmet that’s both Snell SA2020 and FIA 8859-2015 rated will clear a body that only recognizes one of the two, as long as you’ve entered both.

When a requirement depends on class, or can be satisfied a different way

A handful of categories are interchangeable by design — a body treats two different pieces of equipment as satisfying the same underlying requirement, so you only need to fill in whichever one you actually run:

• Window net vs. arm restraint — several bodies (SCCA, PHA, NEHA, Pikes Peak, SCCA Time Trial, SCCNH) let a window net and an arm restraint satisfy the same open-car/no-roll-up-window requirement. Enter whichever one is actually installed; PassTech automatically credits the alternative and doesn’t ask you to fill in both. (Some bodies deliberately don’t offer this swap — GRIDLIFE, for instance, requires window net and arm restraint independently, so check the category card’s own note if you’re unsure.)
• HANS/head & neck restraint vs. neck collar — the drag-racing bodies in this app (IHRA, NHRA, PDRA, WDRA) accept a rigid HANS-style device or a padded neck collar as alternatives to each other. Fill in whichever device you actually use.
• Fire extinguisher vs. fire suppression system — a couple of bodies (Northeast GT, SCCA Time Trial) treat a handheld extinguisher and an on-board suppression system as alternative ways to satisfy the same fire-safety requirement.
• One entry escalating another’s requirement — a few drag-racing rulebooks make the balaclava requirement depend on what you enter for head & neck restraint: run a neck collar and it stays merely conditional; switch to a HANS-style device and the same rulebook now requires a fire-resistant head sock or skirted helmet underneath it. PassTech reflects this automatically once you’ve entered your actual device — you don’t need to do anything special, just enter what you really have.

Separately, the Refine by class dropdown (Check the Rules and Will My Equipment Pass Tech) changes what a body requires for your specific competitor class — e.g. a kill switch that’s required for SCCA Solo’s Modified category but not for Street. That’s independent of how you fill in the gear itself: the same certification entry on, say, your seat is read the same way no matter which class is selected; the class picker only changes which categories are marked Required/Conditional/Recommended for you.

What to photograph

Each item accepts up to six photos — ten for Rollover Protection, since documenting a cage properly can take more angles (overview, tags/labels, logbook page, padding close-ups). The most useful pattern is two shots, not one:

1. An overall shot of the whole piece of equipment — helps you (and anyone reviewing your gear later) confirm at a glance which item a set of certifications belongs to.
2. A separate close-up of the certification tag or label itself, filling as much of the frame as possible, in focus and readable. This is the photo to run Scan tag photo against — a wide shot of the whole helmet with a tiny illegible tag in the background won’t scan reliably.

If a piece of gear has multiple tags in different spots (e.g. a two-piece firesuit’s jacket and pants), photograph each tag separately and run a scan against each photo — don’t rely on one photo to capture both.

Scanning a tag photo — and its privacy implications

Scan tag photo sends the photo you select to PassTech’s own server, which forwards it to Google’s Gemini vision model for analysis and returns back the certification(s) it can read, any dates printed on the tag, and — when the tag shows one — the FIA homologation number too (see FIA homologation numbers above), so a scanned tag gets checked against the real FIA list the same way a manually-typed number would. This is not processed on your phone or computer — unlike every other part of PassTech, which never leaves your browser, a photo you scan this way is transmitted off-device to a cloud API. Don’t scan a tag photo if you’d rather that image never leave your device — entering the standard and dates by hand from the dropdown works exactly the same and never transmits anything.

If a scan comes back empty, low-confidence, or clearly misreads the tag — blurry photo, unusual wording, a standard PassTech doesn’t recognize — fall back to entering the certification manually from the dropdown. The scan is a convenience, not a requirement; every field it can fill in can also be typed in directly.

Scanning a helmet photo

Helmet cards have a second, separate scan button — Scan a full photo of the helmet — next to the Helmet style dropdown. It sends a photo of the whole helmet (not the tag) to the same Gemini vision model, which reports back whether it looks full-face (integrated chin bar) or open-face, and whether a visor/face shield is fitted, with a confidence level and any caveats about the photo.