VIDEO: 1 Lap in the 1 – Berk Technology BMW 135i @ Spring Mountain Motorsports Ranch
MotoIQ Staff Report
Besides its lavish brothels where you can legally get some uh diversions from racing, Pahrump Nevada is known for its state of the art track: Spring Mountain Raceway. We are getting to know our new Traqmate GPS data acquisition system a little better and got to use it again at Redline Time Attack’s stop at Spring Mountain.
We attached our Traqmate system and Contour HD POV cameras to the Berk Technology BMW 135i Street Class Time Attack racer driven by Mike “spell my name right” Bonanni. The Berk car has just about wrapped up a first place championship in Street class.
Watch the video above and you can see where Mike is accelerating, when he is braking, G-Force in acceleration and braking and speed on the video dash display.
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| The Traqmate system can monitor many different parameters and display the data as a strip chart or a track overlay. You can select the parameters from this menu. |
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| The Traqmate is a big help for driver development, you can overlay laps and look at lap to lap variance in time by segment, speed by segment, even line variation on the GPS track map. You can overlay any of the data you select and compare lap by lap. You can also add up all of your segments and do a predictive best lap. |
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| In this track map, acceleration is shown in green, braking in red, and neutral throttle in black. You can see this in the video, green means Mike is accelerating and red means he is on the brakes. You can also do what we did and overlay the data on video, a powerful tool. It’s fun to watch as well. |
The BMW is highly developed and if it were not for its cage, is basically a well sorted street car that is very streetable. Contrary to popular belief, in street class, a stiff race type suspension is not always the hot ticket. Street tires are sensitive to tire shock and the contact patch must be kept happy to find the most grip and the Berk car makes use of its highly adjustable and fully streetable KW Clubsport suspension to make the most of the available grip from the Hankook R-S3s. The RS-3 is not a DOT R-compound tire but a regular high performance street tire.
When you go through the numbers wih us you will be very impressed with this tire/car combo. The data alone should sell a bunch of these tires and KW Suspension as well!
