I was looking at some ads for data acquision products the other day and realized something – everyone has some kind of product that can record your runs, but trying to find a system that will analyze your runs to find out how to make you quicker is like trying to find four perfect “0.500s” in a row at a drag race or ProSolo.
Most software simply shows you various forms of the data that you have so carefully recorded, and leaves the “heavy lifting” of trying to figure out what the data actually means to the person looking at the screen – that means you. If you don’t have experience analyzing data, that expensive data recording system becomes “just another gadget” that occupies time between runs.
Professional race teams don’t depend upon the driver to interpret the data – they have highly-paid professionals who are experts in analyzing data. They can look at a small bump on a data trace and diagnose a serious problem with the car, the driver, or both.
Generally amateur racers don’t have that luxury. It is the rare driver who can be both a good engineer and a good driver. That’s why you see a lot of driver teams consisting of a good engineer and a good driver. The two skillsets are almost mutually exclusive, since the good engineer can generally extract only 100% of the car’s performance, but the good driver can modify the car’s envelope to find that extra 2-to-3% that is outside of the car’s natural envelope. This means that a good driver can – and usually is – sliding the car in small amounts to modify the attitude of the car to increase the envelope in the desired direction by sacrificing a less-desirable direction.
So, what does all of this have to do with AXAnalyst? EVERYTHING! AXAnalyst is that “professional engineer” back in the grid that can look at the data, analyze it, determine what isn’t working, and lead you to an alternate that will work better, in other words, what can make you faster. I’ve broken down years of expertise in car and driver engineering and written that into AXAnalyst. In addition, AXAnalyst can show you how you can modify your driving style to be even better – and faster.
I’ll get to technical info next week, but for now I’ll leave you with this thought: if you can’t look at the data and get the answer you need in less than five minutes, then your data acquisition system is not helping you.