Cosworth Electronics experts, MPS, took on the challenge of creating a Motorsport Dash Display & Data-logging package for the popular Porsche Cayman GT4 MR race car that is competing in the GT4 category of racing around the world.
It could well be argued that the Porsche Cayman GT4 is the only customer racing car available that actually keeps within the “spirit” of the GT4 rules – which were intended for the manufacturers to take a high performance road car and then make the bare minimum of safety focused modifications to turn it into a dedicated race car.
In doing so, Porsche left the standard electronics from the road car in the vehicle which mean that there were a number of crucial functions for efficient car and driver performance development that weren’t catered for as standard.
With our responsibilities to extract the best performance out of car and drivers as the Race Engineer in British GT for Team Parker Racing, MPS set about developing a Dash Display and Data Logging Package for these vehicles utilising Cosworth’s ICD dash logger, as used in the ever popular Porsche 991 GT3 Cup car.
With the car featuring mechanically adjustable brake bias but no easy way of measuring the current bias setting from the driver’s seat, we first added brake pressure hose takeoffs and Variohm Brake Pressure sensors to both the front & rear master cylinders and wired these into the ICD and calibrated them in the Pi Toolset software.
The original dash cluster in the car is an integral part of the Car’s electronics system and therefore couldn’t be removed – instead we chose to mount the ICD display above the centre console and angled this towards the driver.
Not wanting to make non-reversible changes to the expensive car, we CAD designed our own mounting solution and worked with our manufacturing partners to produce the final hardware.
The incorporated shift lights of the ICD weren’t directly within the driver’s line of vision so we decided to add Cosworth’s CLM8 remote, CAN controlled shiftlight module on top of the standard dash cluster.
Improving on the functionality added by the Manthey Racing upgrade package, MPS also designed their own steering wheel mounted switch panel which retains all of the original functionality of the car and adds additional buttons to control the ICD display.
Most importantly, the device taps into the CAN Bus of the car and extracts all of the necessary engine systems and driver data information from the car’s own data systems in order to display it on the dash display as well as log it in the data logger itself for analysis after the on-track session using Cosworth’s powerful Pi Toolbox software.
