Simple to use race timer.

Hi everybody.

I am a complete noob to the world of arduino but very keen to learn.
I would like to build a race timer following the lines of this project
Arduino RFID sports time-keeping system / digital stopwatch - YouTube.

A few changes I want to make to it are as follows.

Firstly I would like to use the following reader. http://www.marktrace.com/en/product-detail-37.html and associated tags.

And secondly, on top of the screen (which I would like to make bigger at some stage) I would like the recorded times and tag data to be spat out to a .csv file.

My questions are:

1: Is this possible and am I going in way over my head for a first project?
2: what do I need in the way of gear from Arduino?

Eventually I would like to also incorporate a small web server runnning a php script for live data and possibly race configuration but for now just the above will be just about perfect for our needs.

Thanks for any suggestions

Regards

Arjan