January 20th, 2010 - So what kind of testing will we be doing? What do you do to gather as much information as possible on such a broad range of driving types. Do you drag race? Do you road race? Street car? Dedicated race car? Weekend warrior? Whichever driving type you prefer, there should be sufficient information here to apply to every scenario. Weather permitting, the plan is to perform skid pad, slalom, road course and drag strip testing each time we test. If possible this will be on a monthly basis until we either run out of parts to install or reach what we feel is a point of questionable continuance.

Our road course, slalom and skid pad testing will be performed at Gainesville Raceway. Their road course was developed specifically for multipurpose vehicle testing and has a nice variety of straight-aways, corners and curves - ideal for this type of testing. For our drag strip testing, we will be using Gainesville Raceway and Bradenton Motorsports Park.

Gainesville Road Course

 
EQUIPMENT
Just simply testing and then telling you our results would be boring, not to mention questionably inaccurate. To truly "see" what is going on and view how we install, test, and document our results we bought the following products:

The GoPro motorsports mini cameras work perfectly for what we are doing. Their small size, durability, and overall capabilities exceeded our expectations for a $200 camera. We bought three of them and chose the wide angle lense version. With a 2GB SD card they are capable of 56 minutes of 512 x 384 video or 1,945 images!

 

I was already a Canon fan but the Canon HF20 HD Camcorder turned out to be even better than we anticipated. It's compact design was very beneficial when filming in cramped areas and it's light-weight (14.1oz.) made holding the camera in for extended periods of time a breeze. With it's 32GB of internal memory, it's possible to record up to 12 hours of high definition video. Great image stabilization and high quality optics are just two more features that make this purchase such a worthwhile investment.

 

Tesla Electronics makes a nice G-meter called the G-Tech PRO RR. The RR version is designed for road racing and has the capability to record up to 2 hours of G readings vs. RPM for playback.

 

The first step was to mount the GoPro cameras in areas that would allow us to see key suspension components during the testing. The GoPro cameras come with a suction cup mount for body panel or glass mounting, two helmet mounts, and three flat mounts. The rear has an optimal spot in an area above the CV shaft. With the wide-angle lense it was possible to see the entire rear suspension. We made a permanent mount so the before/after footage could easily be compared.
The front mount has a great location as far as visibility is concerned however it was dangerously close to the catalytic converter. Every other location was a compromise with either poor visibility or nowhere to attach the camera. In the end this location was just too good to pass up so a temporary heat shield was made to protect the camera. Headers, cat-delete and full exhaust will be installed later anyway so it won't be an issue then and we may not even need the shield.
The outside camera we connected to the driver's side front fender.
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