It’s a beginner’s mistake that I thought that I had grown out of years ago. When we got back to base and unloaded the van, the beacon was not in its usual place. It was where we left it. On the pit wall. Fortunately it was our local track and a thirty mile round trip and a visit to the circuit office got the thing back where it belongs.

We now have a laminated A4 sheet that simply says ‘BEACON’ in large print and a system that requires whoever puts out the beacon to hang the sheet on the van steering wheel. It is usually my job to put out the beacon because I’m so fussy about where it goes. I know that its not absolutely essential that it is in the same place every time but I make sure that it is because although you can shift the lap marker using the software, who needs the extra work on race or test days?

I have devised a simple method to ensure that we are consistent in our beacon placing. The marshals (track workers) at UK circuits always occupy the first part of the pit wall. This part of the wall is normally fenced off and they naturally don’t like beacons being put there. So our beacon always goes on the first available piece of pit wall after the marshals. I always ask politely whether our chosen spot is ok and I feel that this prompts them to keep a bit of an eye on it. It’s not just an anonymous bit of equipment, but it belongs to that nice bloke who always stops to chat and show appreciation of the voluntary work that they do.

The other way round the placing and fetching the beacon problem is to buy the GPS based system that AIM sell and you will never have to bother with a beacon again. You need to train the system to recognise where you want to time your laps from but this involves going into a set-up routine on the dash and pressing a button at the appropriate place. The easy way to do this is to get the car into the pit lane in line with the Start / Finish line and press the button there. Once set, the system remembers this forever. Better than that, because it knows where it is on the planet, it associates this place with a particular track and writes it into your filenames.

You get other benefits with a beacon system as well. You don’t need to measure wheel speed although the very slight time delay with a GPS system gives small differences that you can see on the data but which are not significant for interpretation purposes. The GPS module provides a collection of spin-off data besides speed. Track maps are obviously excellent and v2.30 of Race Studio Analysis enables you to colour the track map according to any parameter you want. The screenshot shows long g and gives a good idea where the heavy braking areas are

The GPS system provides lateral and longitudinal g, gyro, slope and heading data. Most useful of these is the long g data because that makes it possible for you to analyse braking performance which in my experience can be the single most cost effective way of improving lap times. And using GPS data saves you the cost of an additional g sensor and, if you are running with a limited number of channels, saves a channel as well.

Version 2.30 of the Race Studio Analysis software makes creating your own user profiles much easier than it was before, and because it’s easier, it is more likely to be useful.

A profile is simply a set of graphs and statistics that you use frequently and can save for future use. So, for example, if the first thing you look after a run is the engine health, you could set up a profile that brings up all the things that you are interested in. You could create a measures graph that shows engine rpm, and all the relevant temperatures and pressures on one screen Plot this against time so you can see if any time was spent in the pits. An XY chart could be used to plot oil pressure on the Y (vertical) axis and lateral g on the X (horizontal) axis. This will show whether there is any oil surge in the corners. A Channels report that shows the minimum pressures, maximum temperatures and averages of all engine parameters will give instant warning of anything that is out of range.

Clearing away all the other graphs and setting this lot up will take a few minutes, so it makes sense to save it as a Profile. This means that you can access this layout instantly the next time you get data. Get all the data set up in precisely the way that you want it – for instance, even when doing engine health, you might want to show throttle and rpm histograms and it is always a good idea to have the lap times available.

Creating a profile is easy. If your charts are set full screen, press the space bar to make the measures tabs appear. Then select the Profiles tab, and the Save Button. Give your profile a suitable name. The next time you want to look at engine health go to Profiles and select your engine health profile and the graphs and tables that you set up originally will appear using your new set of data.

If the next stage in your data analysis to investigate the handling , then no doubt by now you have worked out that you can do exactly the same thing with charts showing speed, lateral g and corner radius. It makes life at the track simpler and anything that does that is to be welcomed. Engine health, driver / rider inputs and handling profiles cover much of what you will want to know at the track.

If you have never bothered much with the XY Plot feature in Race Studio Analysis, you should give it a go. It can present data in a way that you had probably not thought of before. An XY Plot, shows one variable plotted against another. For example, you can plot speed against rpm to look at gear ratios and gear change points.

To create a plot, Select the XY Plot menu option or button and select one variable in the measures toolbar. For a gear chart it needs to be Engine Speed (rpm). This will be shown on the Y (vertical) axis of the XY plot. Then right-click somewhere on the chart and the pop-up menu will offer you a range of options from which you choose ‘settings’. This then presents you with a dialogue box from which you select Speed. At this point you can choose whether to have the points plotted lines joined together or as dots or circles.

There are other things that you can do using this technique. You can evaluate your driving technique by creating a Friction Circle by plotting longitudinal g on the Y axis and lateral g on the X axis. Any good book on race technique will tell you what the chart shows and how to interpret your driving or riding style.

Another useful plot is to plot oil or fuel pressure on the y axis and lateral or longitudinal g on the x axis. This will give you an idea of whether or not you are suffering from surge during cornering or under braking. Oil surge is indicated if the cloud of points is mushroom shaped. If the oil pressure readings are clustered together and do not drift downwards under high g forces then there is no problem. A quick look at the two charts shown here will give you an idea of what to look for. The first chart shows a car where the pressure stays within bounds during cornering but the second one shows that pressure can fall during hard cornering in either direction.

If the scaling is not quite what you wanted, the things to look out for is that if the Y variable has a number immediately to its left in the measures toolbar, this needs to be a 1. If the X scale is compressed then it is simply a matter of changing the plotting scaling using the Modify Test Channels menu options.

It can be a real pain if you are at an event and you laptop goes down. One way round this is to borrow one from someone else, but whatever you borrow is unlikely to have the Race Studio Suite loaded on to it. A good way round this is to copy the whole directory on to a 4Gb USB stick and to run the program off that.

It sounds like it shouldn’t work and no doubt there are occasions when it won’t, but this trick has got us out of trouble several times. Open Windows Explorer, find the Program Files folder and drag the whole AIM folder onto your memory stick. The program can then be run by selecting the RaceStudio2.exe file and double clicking. The program runs quite slowly but it is a big improvement on not being able to run anything at all and it saves having to install your program on to someone else’s computer.

You might have to install the USB driver on to the new host computer to enable you to download and if you want to run the analysis program you will need to use Windows Explorer to transfer any older data files on to the hard disk of the borrowed machine. It also works if you want to show your data to someone away from the track.

There are a few little-known features in Race Studio Analysis that are really worth knowing about. Probably the most useful and easiest to remember is the use of the spacebar. The normal layout is to have the so-called Measures Toolbar showing on the left of the screen. This shows the various channels that are available and the values that relate to where the cursor is placed.

If you press the space bar, the measures toolbar disappears and uses the whole screen width to display your chart.

You can tidy up the presentation by intelligent use of Channel tags. (A Channel Tag is the name that AIM gives to the small labels on a chart that show the value of a channel at the point where the cursor is placed. The trick is to specify that the strip charts do not contain Channel Tags (On the menu Options – Settings – and uncheck the channel tags box). When the measures toolbar is visible, the tags do not appear and because you have the values in the measures toolbar, but when the chart is full width the program shows the Channel Tags automatically anyway.

One of the features of the analysis software that comes with AIM systems is that it is freely available on the net (see our Downloads page). This means that you can update your software whenever a new version is available and, unlike some systems, the process is free and pretty painless. Download the latest version on to your computer and run the installer. It installs without disturbing your existing data and formats.

The latest version (Race Studio Analysis v2.30.03) is available now and represents a big improvement on what went before. The major change is the ability to select different channels for different types of presentation. In previous versions once you had decided to focus on one set of channels (for example, for a strip chart) any other displays were based on this selection, so you could not have speed, gear and rpm on a strip chart and lateral vs longitudinal g on an XY chart at the same time. That was the only major criticism of the old software (2.22.10 and older) and now it has gone. In its place is the ability to choose what you want to look at and how.

The company has obviously listened to other suggestions as well and there are many other improvements. The program now retains the layout so that when you reopen the data, your layout is as you left it. The number of profiles has increased and if there is a limit, I’ve not found it yet. There are now three separate colour options for the charts and the track and channel reports are much improved. Don’t take our word for it, download and install it and see for yourself.