October 2017 Pit Signals

The October 2017 edition of VARAC Pit Signals by Jeremy Sale has been released!

Click here to download your personal copy.

VARAC Pit Signals

Features this month include:

  • Put in Bay Road Races Reunion
  • Ed Luce Reports from Calabogie
  • Lime Rock’s Historic Festival
  • BEMC Indian Summer Trophy Races
  • Celebration of Motorsport
  • 150 Years of Motor Racing at Celebration
  • What is Different about Vintage Racing?
  • CASC-OR Award Presentations
  • Classifieds and More!

2017 Season Comes to an End

With a gorgeous, sunny weekend at CTMP, the VARAC 2017 season came to a close on Sunday, October 1. Now it’s time to plan upgrades, fix the niggling problems and dust off the project cars for winter enjoyment. 

But first, please mark Sunday, November 19, on your calendars. At 10:00 am we will hold the club’s Annual General Meeting, followed by a lunch and the 2017 Awards Presentations. These events will take place at the Sheraton Parkway Toronto North Hotel & Suites, 9005 Leslie Street, Richmond Hill, Ontario, L4B 1B2. (Map it here)

 

Even as we speak, the Vintage Historic and Classic Directors are tabulating the VARAC Drivers’ Challenge points to determine who won each of our racing classes, as well as the overall club champion.  

 
The club has two other trophies that we require the memberships’ assistance on – the Jim McGregor Spirit of Sportsmanship Award and the James Ferguson Challenge Trophy.  To learn more about these awards, including a list of past recipients please visit: https://varac.ca/membership/awards/ . Please submit your nominations to Gavin Ivory SAP, but no later than October 19th. 
 
Those persons with business to raise at the AGM, or Motions they would like presented to the membership should contact Gavin Ivory, the club Secretary ([email protected]) as soon as possible.  More information about most popular casino website here. We have specific notice periods and items must be in Gavin’s hands by the 19th of October, 2017. He will be assembling the official package that will be sent out to the membership before the AGM.

How to Add Telemetry Like a Pro!

This awesome article by Chris Rupnik is a re-print from the October 2016 issue of Pit Signals.

I owe David DiCesar credit for this finding.  While at the spring classic at Tremblant earlier this year – David clued me into what I had wanted most: Telemetry for our vintage cars! 

As Tremblant doesn’t have a racehero.io compatible version of their track software – all we could get as racers was the best lap and total time.  That’s probably fine for most – but I’m a numbers guy and would have appreciated more statistics.  He had pruchased an android phone at Walmart in the U.S., one of those cheapy deals where you get the phone for very little dollars but have to pay a high monthly fee.  What I didn’t know – and the key – is that the phone works fine without it ever being activated.  The software is loaded on the phone via a wifi connection – and the GPS tracking doesn’t require an active cell phone contract to work.  I should have guessed that – but now I knew for sure.

This opens up the ability to use any old android or apple phone as a track phone!  Maybe someone in your family has upgraded to the latest and has an older phone that is no longer suitable for daily use – however recording 30 minutes of track telemetry requires very little processing power – so really even phones from 3-4 years ago work perfectly!

VARAC Vintage Racing

The software that I use is free – and is called track addict.  This software has all the tracks loaded into it – and once you load the application on your phone in fact detects via the GPS which track you are at.

The app is pretty amazing.  Using the GPS which provides specific time and location – it is able to determine speed – G-force and what I really wanted – lap time for each lap at Tremblant!  Depending on how you mount your phone – you can even take video.  However, in my case I much prefer the quality provided by my gopro cameras.

As vintage cars are not allowed to view the telemetry while in the car – please mount your camera in such a way as you cannot see the screen while running, in my case Andrew built a lovely marsupial pouch.  If capturing the video isn’t necessary – I am pretty sure just having the phone in your pocket in an open topped car is good enough.  Once the session is over – the data is exported as an excel file (CSV) which is then emailed separately – once the phone is in wifi connection.  (Editor’s note – please do not carry your phone in your pocket while driving – have it securely mounted away from where it can slip down an interfere with operation of your vehicle).

Now for my case where I have multiple gopro camera video that I want to overlay, the same company that provides track addict application makes “RaceRender” which is $30 but does exactly what I need.  This software is step by step assembly of very professional looking video.  It takes the CSV file from the phone, asks a few little questions and has a great sync tool that matches the telemetry to the actual video.  There are many different pre-defined dash type layouts to choose from – and this is the one that I have found most to my liking.  The results is pretty spectacular – and you can see that since the CHGP I ahve been using it on all my videos.  Example:  https://youtu.be/yOZ-alK1Now

Walter demonstrated at the 2014 CHGP the Harry Lap Timer software which does effectively the same thing but the editing of the final video is done on an ios device – which isn’t my personal preference.

I hope to see more people taking advantage of this great tip by David – THANKS!

TrackAddict

RaceRender