Videos from One Lap with Race-Keeper
Capturing video on One Lap is challenging. I remember Sean coming over after the first session of Road America to tell me that his camera stopped after a minute of recording, after the battery died. I chuckled, and said “welcome to my entire 2009 Season of trying to make video work”. There is no time to get cameras clear, batteries charged, or things setup. This year, it seemed like time was even shorter.
However, this year I cheated. Thanks to Hugh over at Wilson Performance, we not only made capturing video on the trip easy, we completely overshot the requirements for sharing a few laps around the track. Wilson Performance let us take their Race-Keeper system on the entire weeklong trip around the country. They are a distributer for the systems, so if you are considering getting a system, let me know and I will put you in touch with them.
Let me be clear in saying, we completely under-utilized the Race-Keeper system. With little time to set it up, I slapped two cameras on the car and hit the button. 8 days later, I have a pile of videos to go through, and I am only now appreciating how little we used this system.
We also under-utilized the system, because we are in a 1992 car and this thing will capture all of the information from OBDII, which is any car made after 1996. The GPS was enough to map the track for us and give us a speedometer readout, but the possibility of logging everything from braking and acceleration makes this thing pretty powerful.
I only ran into two instances where I didn’t get the video. One was the first session at Road America, because we didn’t have a dedicated power source. We kept turning off the power to the car, which reset the system that was plugged into the cigarette lighter. I wired up a permanent power source between sessions. The other one was when we forgot to stop recording and we filled up a memory card before we got to the grid the second time. If I trusted the system, you can actually set it up to record when the car starts moving and have it automatically stop. I didn’t have enough time with it yet to use that, so I reverted to the “push the big red” button method.
I am working to bribe Hugh to let me take the system to Watkins Glen in two weeks with the Niagara Region PCA Drivers Education course, but it may conflict with the Wilson Performance race schedule. Then I could run the system in the Evo X to really show the cool features.
