Data acquisition a broad topic – on modern race cars, there are oceans of data recorded over a run, from hundreds of sensors measuring quantities from airspeed via pitot tubes, fuel flow with ultrasonic sensors, ride heights via lasers and much in-between.
Instrumentation in a trackside context allows engineers to understand what state the vehicle is in at a particular moment and make performance-related changes to improve drivability, tyre performance, dynamic response of the car, and assess and enhance driver technique.
Here, I’ll cover a few techniques used to process and visualise the data and touch on how they are analysed to provide meaningful assessments into the vehicle dynamics and driver’s input in the lap.
Kicking off with the topic of roll stiffness, you’ll recognise this one from the springs & dampers article. Roll Stiffness Distributions
With damper potentiometers or, better yet, laser ride height sensors, it’s possible to understand the amount by which the chassis is rolling in response to lateral acceleration.
 Through measuring spring compression, potentiometers allow us to understand the roll angle induced by elastic weight transfer. Furthermore, combined with laser ride height sensors, an observation of the tyre deflection caused by geometric weight transfer can also be made.
Using some simple maths, the linear displacements measured by this instrumentation are used to establish the roll angle for each axle on ...