Tsukuba TC2000 - 09/05/02

Bit of a disaster of a day at Tsukuba today. 30 cars on the track and not all of them managed to stay on it all the time so there was quite a lot of yellow flags throughout my 3 sessions. Best time was 1'11.3 which I set in the first session even though I had nearly a full tank of gas.

Anyway, Monday and Tuesday await and I'm a little more ready now. This photo shows my new helmet paint to match the car. Side of the helmet is a wolf shape which if you stretch your imagination also reads TOM top-to-bottom. Yes - it requires that you think real hard about it :-)

The good news is RPMs worked great, so I'll see if I can put up a video if I have time later today.

Karting again in Chiba 09/04/26

I still haven't found my way to TC2000 since the last race. I haven't been avoiding it... just worked out that way. I was supposed to go on the 25th but it was a very wet day so I canceled and ended up going karting on the 26th instead.

Karting is such a blast particularly when you get a nice handling kart which just does what you want it do do. Even it wild oversteer moments if you are quick enough it comes right back although you do lose speed that way :-)

Anyway, thought this was a decent photo and it does show my new helmet paint job which I haven't blogged about yet. I'll take another photo of it when I put the darker visor on.

The good news is weather for the rest of the week and the beginning of next week is looking fine as I'm due to hit TC2000 on the 2nd, 4th and 5th :-)

Adding an RPM input to TraqMate

The TraqMate unit provides a wire whose sole purpose in life is to hook into a tachometer feed and tell you how many RPMs you are doing. By hooking in RPMs, tire sizes, gear ratios etc you also get some other info like what gear you are in, what HP/Torque your car is producing. It also makes for more entertaining videos as the rpm needle should finally move!

After asking around and gathering the required info on how to connect that wire to the car, I finally got together with my good friend The FeatherKing and hooked it in.


Traqmate Display Unit showing the live RPM feed.

It all turned out to be quite easy after we had TraqMate hooked up to the cars power/ground. The key is the following diagram which shows where to connect the TraqMate wire to. The target wire is marked TA and is color coded Yellow/Black.


The PCM is on the roadster is located under the airbox and once you get the airbox off (and disconnect the battery etc), you see something like the following. The red arrow shows the 2nd wire from the left on the top row where we hooked into.


Once we'd tapped the wire and tested it to the TraqMate unit by setting the car as a 1 cylinder car in the TraqMate car setup, it all worked and we needed to find a way through the firewall from the engine bay into the cabin where the TraqMate unit is kept. This also turned out to be quite easy and we found a nice path using the same access hole which my gauges were using. The arrow below shows the place.


Finding where this hole came out in the cabin was another thing... I forgot to take a photo of this part but its basically deep in the passenger footwell and higher up than you expect.

The following photo shows where I have both the TraqMate Sensor Unit and ChaseCam stored under the passengers seat. It works out quite well with some heavy duty velcro sticking them both down.


I'm getting really fond of the ChaseCam unit even though I am officially still testing it. The camera mounts nice and low and the units mic is out of the wind unlike when I had my conventional handy-cam up there on the rollbar.


All I have to do now is hit the track and get some proper footage! Next track day is May 2nd and of course the Party Race is coming up on May 5th. Wish me luck!

Creating a video with TraqMate

I've been wanting to upload a TraqMate video of March 10th at Fuji for sometime now but I thought it would be fun to show a little demo of how easy it is using the TraqMate/Chasecam combination to pull out a video of your best lap of a certain session. So here it is...



Two things wrong with this video of course... One is that the video capture program that I used to capture the video from my desktop doesn't actually show the video that the TraqMate software actually shows for some reason. It does show the other videos though which is a bit wierd. But anyway... The second thing is that I was too lazy to do sound :-)

So - once you do all that, you basically end up with your video file... It's so easy. No more editing or not much anyway depending on what you want to do. The video I made in that video is this one... Its not actually my fastest lap but it's not so slow either :-) I'm quite the happy camper with my purchase!



Enjoy!

Tsukuba TC1000 - 09/03/01

I'm rather late about posting an update on TC1000. Needless to say I had a great time and it was great to be back in the car again and to put it through its paces. Before going though, my tires were in bad condition from the last endurance race last year. The front tires were pretty badly worn so I decided to try using 2 rear tires from my spare set on the front and to see how that went. The rear tires don't wear so much on the roadster compared to the front so it seemed like a good idea to save some money.

So as well as needing to wear in new front tires, it was also my first time with the Chasecam and TrackMate setup. I was looking forward to trying that out. Tires proved to be quite a challenge for the first 2 sessions with lots of under-steer followed by some over-steer. TC1000 is not a bad place to enjoy a little over-steer though as its quite safe and I was soon having a lot of fun.

I managed to post my best time at TC1000 which is 0'43.847 some 700ms faster than my previous best. The weather had a lot to do with that I think as the temperatures were still quite on the cool side of things.

Unfortunately, I was in a bit of a rush to setup the camera and the footage is all sideways as I didn't check it before recording. Shame on me! However, TraqMate worked flawlessly and gave me some interesting data to look at. The most interesting thing was comparing 3 other drivers of my car against each other and seeing the differences in lines, braking etc. I've prepared a little video which I captured from TraqMate to show off this cool feature.



A note about the video. The car is my car. I was the only person in the car when I was driving where as I was in the passenger seat for the other 3 drivers. I'd estimate the car was therefore about 60kg lighter when I was driving it hence acceleration is a little better. Tyre conditions and fuel loads were also getting better with the green driver having the worst of it and the red driver having the lightest fuel load and probably the best grip as I'd wore the front tires down nicely.

You can really see where my strengths and weaknesses are. I need to work on my braking mostly. I think I'm engaging ABS too much as I take too long to slow down on the first hairpin. I also lose time under braking into the first section of the last corner. The GPS really shows how the lines differ too. So lots of ideas for what to try out next time I visit TC1000.

The Traqmate Kit

As promised in my previous post, here are some photos of the Traqmate Data Logger. I haven't got the installed photos handy right now but here is what it looks like when it arrives.

This is the pizza style box it comes in. Quite nice presentation I think.

And this is what's hiding inside! The Display Unit, Sensor Unit and a few other necessities.

New TraqMate Datalogger!

It's almost March! My first session since November's race last year will be at Tsukuba TC1000 on Sunday - March 1st. Can't wait to get back on the track.

Since I've been gone, I've been busy saving money and well decided to splurge out and get a data logger. After looking around for quite a while I decided to go with TraqMate. Some cool features are:

• High GPS sampling rate (up to 40Hz). Higher sampling means more accurate info me thinks. This is pretty high compared cheaper offerings.
• Extendability - Programmable Analog/Digital inputs for recording stuff like water temp, rpms, brake lights, ABS or anything else you care to tap a wire into.
• Integrated Video - Can view video directly with data analysis. This is great as you can see why you were slow/fast etc directly with the sector data!
• Video Creation - Save certain laps etc as video along with a virtual display for speed, g-forces etc. I do like my videos so this is a great function for me.
• Small Footprint - separate display unit takes up less front window space than a performance box for example.
• Easy to Use - I tried a friends last year and it was really easy to use. I also tried the Performance box but Traqmate wins hands down.

Anyway, I'm rather excited about my new purchase and getting some data at TC1000 this weekend. I've also got a chase cam on lend so will compare that to my usual video recorder.

Oh yeah, in case you are interested, I might as well point you in the direction of TraqMate Japan. The website is TraqMate Japan. If you get tempted, please mention that you heard about it from Tweety and you might get a discount! The website is still under construction so if you can read English you might get more info from the main website in the US.

Anyway, I'll try and take some photos later and will be sure to post some video from Sunday.