Data entry

Putting a number on suspension movements, lateral and longitudinal acceleration, wheel speeds, rpm, throttle position, line brake pressure, steering angle or rack stroke and gear position are channels that enable you to quantify each of these factors, and to see how they will influence the car’s dynamics and behaviour. At the same time, if you can examine what actions the driver has taken and so analyse his inputs, driving style and the results, you and your driver will be able to improve the use of the racecar.

The second element is to monitor the engine, gearbox and other ancillaries to check their health, logging abuses for subsequent maintenance. In the worst case, it at least enables you to know what factors led to a failure, such as over revving, wrong gear selection, bottoming out your dampers, overheating, lack of oil pressure etc.

Alarms built into your panel and linked to the software can also lighten the driver’s load, only warning him when necessary, so he or she does not have to monitor instruments continuously. If connected to the pits by telemetry, it also allows the team to monitor and advise in real time.

Otherwise, data logging is an invaluable tool for aero development, measuring pressures and loads to correlate with the measures taken in wind tunnel or CFD simulation. Likewise, correlating values with dynamic simulation.

Early days

In the early days of racing, some of this information was available through instruments and gauges, but was dependent on the driver to monitor and remember for later description to the engineers. The driver already had a heavy working load under stressful conditions, including high g forces and huge physical effort, all while also visually monitoring the track and opposition at high speeds.

Data logging is an invaluable tool for… correlating values with dynamic simulation

Given all this, taking eyes off the environment to look at instruments, and remembering the values and where it happened, is not helpful to the core job of driving as fast as possible. Data logging records all the information measured during the run, for thorough analysis later, providing a permanent log for future reference, independent of any driver, freeing them for their duties.

But imagine for a moment only having one logged parameter; rpm for example. Yes, you can derive a massive amount of information from just that, providing you know the ratios, final drive and tyre diameters.

Add driver input to say what gear they