RACING enthusiast Y.K. Tan's best lap time at Sepang is just one second shy of the 1 min 35 seconds Sepang lap record set by Juan Pablo Montoya in 2004. The difference is, Tan's record is in the F1 Championship Edition video game but pro-racer Juan's is the real McCoy on the track.
Y.K., who is in his 30s, is not just your virtual geek. He is the proud owner of a one-year-old white Porsche Cayman and races on the Sepang F1 track regularly in it. His lap time on real wheels - 2 min 51 seconds.
He is among hundreds of active motoring enthusiasts here who hit the Sepang F1 track regularly with their own sports cars.
Ryan Chua, 26, co-founder of the BMW SG Car Club which has over 12,000 members, said that such sessions can cost between RM$10,000 (S$4,142) and $15,000 for three to four hours.
Members share the costs, so each person ends up paying about RM$400 per session.
Ryan, who is the marketing vice-president of gaming peripherals maker Razer, brings his black BMW Z4M Coupe down to the track.
Recently, Y.K. and Ryan have seen their real track times improve significantly, thanks to a data analyser device called the Race Logic Performance Box.
The size of a Cash Card IU unit and with a GPS receiver built in, it's placed on the dashboard or mounted on the windscreen.
As the amateur racers go round the track, the device measures race data like speed, position and acceleration 10 times every second. The results are stored in the MMC flash-memory card which can be copied to the PC for data analysis with the software provided.
The data can then be overlaid onto Google Earth and the racers can see the actual path they took during their laps as well as their lap times, G-Force and even the time taken to travel a specific segment of a lap.
The technology in the box is a scaled-down version of the advanced $500,000 systems used by the F1 racing teams but, at $700, it's a fraction of the cost.
Making sense of the data requires the skills of an expert like Shaun Yip, 27. The data analysis engineer has worked in the IRL Indycar Series in the United States, among others.
He recently set up Ascendant Motorsport (www.ascendant-motorsport.com) to provide data analysis services and products ranging from entry-level $700 devices to pro data systems up to half a million dollars.
'On average, I can help the enthusiast sport driver improve his lap time by five to 10 seconds,' added Shaun.
One customer is car tuner Erik Toh, 34, who goes to Sepang regularly.
'Anybody can claim to make your car go faster. But with the box, I can prove it to my customers,' said Erik.
For Y.K., the data analysis is helping him improve his track times, both at Sepang and on his TV screen.
'Now I know how to take the corners better and which turns to brake. In just a few months, I have gone from 1 min 39 to 1 min 35 seconds. That's a lot of time, even in the virtual world,' he said.
This article first appeared in Straits Times Digital Life on September 24, 2008.
