Get the Most from Your Karting Data Logger

Karting Data-loggers can be a shortcut to success, or can be a curse and completely absorb a test day leaving you worse off than when you started! This article gives you a quick insight on where to focus your attention to make sure you don't get buried under a mountain of useless numbers.

Steps

  1. Have your kart driver do a couple of sessions and use the data-logger to find the most important corners using the speed channel to identify those corners on his quickest laps
  2. Ask your driver to concentrate on one of those corners at a time and experiment with his methods for that corner, so you can find a formula to achieve the highest speed on that corner.
  3. Experiment with kart set up to achieve the quickest speed through that corner, your driver will have a good feel for the corner and will want the kart to work really well there, and therefore be quite demanding about set-up.

Tips

  • More often than not, the most important corners are long fast sweeps which require careful speed control, or ones leading onto the straight...however, this isn't always the case and your data-logger can reveal hidden secrets to quick times around your track, which is info your competition will rarely pick up.
  • Working in this way with the speed channel is going to give you a great feel for using your data-logger and you will then start to want more information to work with, then you can refine your approach and start to look at more channels. Don't worry if bigger teams are using all the data they can get their hands on, if you learn the data-logger in a natural way, starting with speed trace and allowing the driver to ask for more information when he wants it, then learning the data-logger will be a rewarding experience. For example he might ask how early he got his foot in on a particular corner because he wants to know how early he can do it without losing time, the point is to let your driver lead your quest for data, not just the fact that so much data is available, otherwise you will get overwhelmed.
  • Remember, demands on your time on a day at the track are already very tight...so keep the data logger work clean and simple and you will reap the benefits

Warnings

  • Instead, you need to spend the practice day with focus on those quick corners so that your driver can 'home in' on the quick way round the most important corners. And when it comes to a pressure situation he will resort to that knowledge and carry on banging in quick laps, rather than overdriving and blowing the race.
  • The beauty of a data-logger is that it can show you exactly where on the track your driver was fast, and how that affected his lap time. And the most important data is your KPH trace, or your RPM trace. Lets say your driver does a 10 lap session, and inexplicably he did a lap half a second quicker than the rest. So, you look at the speed trace for that lap, compare it to the rest of his laps and look for the corners where he was carrying more speed. Now the temptation is to look at throttle, braking and lines mapping and give your driver an information overload, and a feeling he is driving with big brother on his back.

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References

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