Those of you who have carburetors andpoints can read this for amusement, but,fact is, this isn’t your father’s Pontiac.The new GTO has a phenomenal elec-tronic fuel management and ignitionsystem that not only keeps it emissionlegal, but also produces 20+ mpg on thehighway and 13-second quarter miletimes. And, while it’s not politically cor-rect to brag about GM these days, thislatest version of the LS-1 engine andelectronics is pretty slick in stock trim. Prior to our first open road racingevent, we wanted to be able to monitora variety of parameters that might influ-ence performance and found a new out-fit producing just what we needed.Aeroforce Technology makes neatgauges that monitor, in real time, virtu-ally all the outputs of the computer,ranging from ignition advance to fuelinjection pulse duration to inlet air tem-perature. And they simply plug into thediagnostic terminal on the car. Since ourGTO is a race car, we skipped the nice-ties and just mounted them on a piece ofaluminum bolted to the dash, so ournavigator could read and note them as
we made our waydown the racecourse.What we learned thenenabled us to makechanges in the com-puter programming asrequired. For moreinfo about AeroforceTechnology gauges,take a look at theirwebsite, www. aeroforcetech.com Now that we knew what was hap-pening in the stock computer, ourfriends at Superchips built us a pro-grammer to modify the factory settingsas required. These are pretty easy to use,plug into the diagnostic terminal andtune the pre-determined Superchips per-formance upgrade by just pushing a but-ton or adjust your shift points, shiftfirmness, fan setting, rev limiter, speedlimiter, and gear ratio as required foryour specific needs. And, another pushof the button will return the computer toits original stock configuration if neces-sary. Along with an increase in perfor-mance, customers report fuel economygains of 1 to 2 mpg. Horsepower gains
up to 10% over stock aretypical through SuperchipsPerformance tuning. It’sworked so well on theGTO, that I’ll be doing mytow vehicle, a GMCDualie, next. For more in-formation, look atwww.superchips.com. Then we built our ownsystem for reading tire tem-perature in real time. Oneof the dangers in open roadracing is tire failure. Obvi-ously losing a tire at 165+mph can be catastrophic
and there hasn’t been any way tosatisfactorily monitor tire pressuresand temperatures in real time. Thetire pressure monitoring devicescurrently available don’t reactquickly enough for racing purposesthough they’re just fine on the high-way. Since tire temperature is aprime indicator of impending tireproblems, we found a simple infra-red sensor-driven tire temperaturemeasuring device would meet ourneeds. Most professional racingteams use some sort of data acquisi-tion system to monitor a variety of
performance related items during a raceand taking a line from them, we built abasic system using an infrared sensormounted in the wheel well that readseach tire temperature on a rotating basis,changing every 10 seconds. Using abaseline of 200 degrees, an alarm systemlights a warning light when that tem-perature is exceeded, giving us the op-portunity to slow to reasonable speeds ifnecessary. It hasn’t been, so far. If you’ve been camping, fishing, fly-ing, or driving a rental car, you’ve prob-ably used a GPS. We use two, one toread top speed and average speed andanother to function as a stopwatch andas a backup in case of driver or GPSfailure. Accuracy on these is +/- 20 feet;close enough for what we’re doing andthey help if we can’t find our way backto the hotel. If you look carefully, you’llsee the GPS reads 159 mph as the maxi-mum speed it’s reached so far.(For more information on the DaveWolin GTO road racing project– aswell as other race info– check out:www.davewolin.com/motorsports.)
Hi-Tech Electronicsfor the ‘04 GTO
By: Dave Wolin • Oakhurst, California
26 SMOKE SIGNALS OCTOBER 2005
