Video with Data!

Yesterday was the Renegade Miata Club's School event which is a great opportunity to test out the car, and my new data/video equpment while getting advice from top drivers in the area. The day was a distinctly New England day... it started dry/cool, moved to wet, cold and sleeting and then the sun came out dried everything up and temps moved up into the 60's. In any case I sorted out some kinks and began to remember what to do when presented with several hundred orange cones, open pavement and a lotus.

Here's a video with data for my second fastest run of the day... 72.6 seconds. I didn't bother to shoot video for fun runs, when I had a 71.1.

The video was shot with a Sony Action Cam, data logged with a Race Capture Pro data logger, and video rendered with Race Render. It all worked great except Race Render doesn't seem to like empty values in the first row of data, so I had to open it as CSV in copy a couple of values from row 2 to row 1 to get it to recognize the columns properly. After that it was a breeze.

I'm very pleased with the quality of data from Race Capture Pro. It has none of the jitter an looks way better in Solo Storm than the MaxQData logger I bought 4 years ago (for more money). Of course in fairness to the MaxQ folks this could be because I actually took the time to mount it on vibration reducing mounts bolted to the dash rather than just slapping on a bit of velcro on it...