you've beaten everyone that's beaten you

the reason i was in indiana was to pick up a used set of ssr competition wheels.

since the ssr's already had tires on them from the previous owner, i installed the wheels for a day until my toyo ra1's arrived on thursday, which i had mounted yesterday in preparation for road america on monday. i finally stepped up to an r-compound and found lightweight wheels to mount them to, though i really like the way the ssr's look and kind of want a set for my street tires now.

as you can see by the picture, i now have 18 tires in my garage: 4 toyo ra1's (which are now on the ssr's), the 4 toyo t1r's on my bbs wheels for street, 4 dunlop wintersport tires on the stock r32 wheels for winter, 4 crappy tires mounted to the stock steelies for the 318, and 2 spare toyo t1s' that i keep for no apparent reason. not pictured are the 4 more nitto tires that were on the ssr's when i got them, which are now in another pile in the garage. so i suppose that's actually 22 total tires when the r32 is in the garage, or 27 if i can fit the 318 back in at the same time (which i can't because i have so many damn tires).

at the last track day at autobahn, i looked at someone's gps-based lap timing system. while timing laps (like with a stopwatch) is kind of a no-no in the audi club, being able to see the actual data behind the time is very useful since one can see which line was taken and what the speeds were in to/out of each turn for every lap.

i looked into one of these gps timers, which was about $1000 for the complete system, and it only contained a gps antenna, a small display to show the current lap time, and a recording device. the data had to be downloaded to a computer after the event, so only the per-lap times could be accessed in real-time inside the car or even in the paddock.

not wanting to pay $1000, i figured i could make my own system by just buying a gps antenna, connecting it to my treo 700p, and writing a palm application to access the antenna and record data.

i bought tomtom navigator 5, which included a bluetooth gps antenna, their navigation software, and lots of maps. i actually used the navigation to find my way to the guy's house in indiana, and it works very well. while looking into what it would take to write a palm app to talk to the gps antenna, i found this gps lap timer which pretty much did everything i wanted to do anyway. it records and displays lap times in real-time (and automatically start/stop a lap when i come around to the start point) as well as records position, speed, height, and plots the course. all of this data can be exported off of the treo afterwards, which i will use to make some sort of web interface to browse and archive the data.

i hard-wired the gps antenna into the car the other day and got a mount for the treo. hopefully the audi club doesn't complain about me using it at road america.