The Need For Speed

In 1999 I bought a new Triumph Daytona 955i. I don't like to admit I bowed to peer pressure but I was talked into it by a college buddy. I never considered myself a "Sportbike Guy" but I wanted to ride and my Suzuki wasn’t going anywhere anytime soon. I figured the Daytona was an experiment. Worst case scenario: I wouldn't like it and I'd sell it in a year and lose a little money. So I bought it.

(If my mother is reading this right now she's thinking "No. The worst case scenario is you race some friend down a side street, whack into a post and I get a frantic phonecall from your friends mother." My early history on two-wheels was not good. It was a traumatic time for mom.)

Sportbikes are made for the track. There's nowhere else you can even come close to using the cabapilities of a modern sportbike. If you have a sportbike and you haven’t taken it to the track you have no idea what you’re riding. You don’t have to worry about speed limits, gravel, rabbits, on-coming traffic, or the idiots going 45 in the left lane with their blinker on. All you need to worry about it is the asphalt coming at you from the front.

Trust me, take it to a track. It doesn't have to be expensive. Some people spend $20k+ on their track-day pit equipment, not including the bike. They also probably go to 30 tracks days every year. I have a trailer. It was $250 online. It came in a box. Some days I use it to haul crap to the dump. It works perfectly well to haul a bike.

I'll probably spew a bunch of track day stories throughout this blog. But for now I'll just try to focus on what's going on. The goal is to install an on-board video system.

I bought a lip-stick camera from helmetcamera.com. It's mounted in the nose (pictures coming soon). That was pretty easy.

I've had less luck trying to setup the recording device. I first tried a Mustek PVR-A1. It was small, wrote to an SD card, and was < $100. All good. But it only gave 320x240 resolution, 15 fps, and the image color quality wasn't that good. I was hoping for something more.

I looked around and found that there are alot of people who make what I wanted, but most of them were $1000+. (The folks who claim to make the video and data-collection unit for John Force were very nice and had a very impressive setup. But for $3500 I'll have to leave that to the NHRA professionals.)

Right now I'm trying an Archos AV500 as a recorder. The picture quality 640x480, 30fps. The problem is that it uses an HDD not flash-memory so vibration is a problem. (When vibration takes over you it keeps the HDD from writing the file, so you don't get any data at all.) I created a sleeve out of foam to help isolate the recorder but it's not very reliable.