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| In addition to the displays seen on the basic page and comparative overlays, you can look at the dash in competition mode. This is what you see projected onto the video overlay. You can see the lap time, distance traveled, instantaneous speed, brake or acceleration lights and G-Force, shown here as a friction circle. |
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| G-Forces in all axis’s are plotted on a friction circle, look at the inner circle which represents one G. As you can see the Berk car spends plenty of dwell time when cornering and braking in the zone well over one G! Look at the density of the population surfing the one G limit in combinations of braking and turning as well. This speaks alot on how well the Berk car works and how good of a driver Bonanni is. What is also amazing is that Spring Mountain is a very flat track. The turns have no bank so you are looking purely at the amount of grip the car and its Hankook RS-3 street tires generate. We are really going to look toward getting Hankooks on some of our project cars, especially after seeing this data! The Berk car spends a lot of time in steady state at 1.3 lateral G’s! Remember this is a street car on street tires running at close to stock street weight. Some of the interior is removed but probably not enough to make up for the weight of the cage. |
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| In this chart, acceleration and braking G’s are recorded. The Berk car can brake at 1.3 G’s maximum. This is amazing for a street car. The high braking G’s are when the car is braking solely in a straight line and are a testament to how good of a driver Bonanni is. |
We were able to amass this much data just from a quick drop in install. If you tap into the car’s sensors, you can have many more inputs to log, for instance if the unit is hardwired into a race car permanently. The Contour HD cameras are a great tool as well. They have pretty decent image quality, can accept a pretty big 8 GB card for long recording time and have much superior sound to GoPro’s the other popular POV camera.
We put a sock over the camera’s microphone to damp out wind noise and the sound quality is pretty good when you do this. The sound on GoPro’s is terrible, even engine noises sound awful. The Laser aiming pointers on the Contour HD are also very useful when setting up the cameras.
We have even used the cameras as a poor man’s data logger, pointing them to monitor the dash and even using them to view a race car’s suspension to see what is going on while on the track. Video data is much easier to interpret than a bunch of squiggly lines from linear transducers or string pots. Especially when the video is overlaid with data from the Traqmate.
