Autosport Labs

On a typical autocross, the start/finish gates cannot be stopped at to acquire a starting & finish location. A nice feature would be if the driver could use his/her GPS enabled smartphone to walk to the start & finish gates, mark both and then go back to the car and transfer these coordinates to the RCP to be used.

Also, in another thread there was a suggestion to start AutoX timing based on G-force. I would highly discourage this, since the start timing gate is usually not right at the starting line, but a few feet in. To get more accurate timing that matches the event timing, it should only start when the GPS marked starting point is crossed + G-forces are there (to prevent false starts due to GPS).

These are great points. Agree that a combination of g-forces + GPS coordinates are necessary for detecting launch point.

Interesting. Autocross is clearly different to competitive events here in the UK. Over here, the car is lined up with the timing beam (within 10cm) for sprints and hillclimbs, whilst AutoSolo is usually timed by stopwatch from the moment the car's wheels start spinning. Using longitudinal G >0.3 and within 10m of the starting point usually does nicely for comparing runs.

All autocross I do is beam timed but you stage about 1 car length before the beam