I have been building and tuning cars since 1991. Over that time I have used a lot of devices as testing tools to measure speed and performance. Vericom (old school accelerometer), Stalker radar with stats (many magazines have used and still used), Dynojet dyno (we use every day) and about a year ago I bought a VBox - a GPS based device that measures all combinations of time, speed and distance. Car and Driver and Road & Track currently use VBox on everything they test. Most manufacturers use VBox for their testing too. The kit is way overly sophisticated and expensive - at almost $5k.
Racelogic, a UK firm who makes the VBox as well as popular traction control devices and other trick electonics parts has recently introducted a new GPS based testing system. Its call the Driftbox. From what I am told it was developed in by Racelogic to help one of its partners, Blitz to be able to offer a form of measuring drift angles for drifting competitions. This would offer the drivers and judges a more scientific way of measuring their drifting skills. Racelogic also incorporated much of their VBox technology in the Driftbox. Here is where it gets really good.
The Driftbox or as I call it - the DBox - suction cups up to the inside of your front windshield - just like your radar detector. It has a display that you can adjust to give you all kinds of data while you are on your favorite test road, the drag strips, autocross track or road course. All forms of acceleration (0-60, 0-100, 0-1 mile, etc.), braking data, lateral G's, actual speed, VMax (max speed) and lap times. it has a removable memory chip that you can take and feed the data to your laptop or PC where you can do a GPS based map and lap overlay of your favorite race track, etc.
The DBox can do everything that my expensive VBox does for about $4,400 less money! And the DBox is way more user friendly that the VBox. I am so excited about how badass this thing is that I just ordered 100 of them from Racelogic. I have 5 in stock now and 25 more coming in a few weeks.
If this is something you are interested in then please read more about it at
www.Driftbox.com
You can find this product on Ebay by just doing a search for Driftbox.
John Hennessey
www.HennesseyPerformance.com
04-05-2006, 10:48 PM
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