2005 GTO - A Day At The Airfield

Here's our GTO with its new shoes, a set of factory 18-inch wheels in powdercoated gunmetal.

Most car enthusiasts have raced their car or someone else's at some point in time. For many, racing is the main reason why they're involved in the hobby, while others see it as icing on the cake to owning such a great-performing car. Whatever your reasoning may be, racing is a great part of this hobby and there are many different types you can become involved in.

Drag racing is the most commonly performed segment. It's cheap, easy to get involved in, and the U.S. is littered with quarter-mile and eighth-mile tracks. Very little effort is needed to get your car out on the track to find out one of the most important elements of your Pontiac's acceleration--its e.t. in the quarter-mile. Some prefer to get a little deeper into their car's performance and choose to take their Poncho onto a road course. The problem with this form of racing has become very clear: It can be very expensive and it must be done on a closed course, such as Virginia International Raceway or Sebring International Raceway. Not too many people live 15 minutes from such a course, which makes it very hard for everyone to become active in this form of motorsport.

There is a solution, however, that's growing in popularity: autocross. This form of racing takes the argument of not having a track near you out of the equation. Any parking lot can become an eligible surface for setting up your cones and unleashing your Pontiac. There are also plenty of clubs that go out to small airfields on weekends. Many of them even use professional timing data, allowing you to compare your stats after each lap.

When we had a chance to take our '05 GTO out to the autocross at Hernando County Airport in Brooksville, Florida, we used a DriftBox from Race Logic. It provided us with extremely accurate lateral acceleration data from our Goat, along with acceleration times. This nifty tool allowed us to further delve into our lap times and find out what went wrong and where. We didn't even begin to tap into the potential of this GPS-based data acquisition system, but plan to in future trips to autocrosses, road races, and the dragstrip.

Car Specs

This DriftBox was used to acquire the acceleration data for the testing. We feel that there's much room for improvement with the Goat's acceleration, and we plan to test it out. You can store your run data onto an SD memory card for convenient viewing from your home computer.

This is just part of the list you have access to when it comes to performance data in Performance Mode.

The GPS feed controls this compass and speedometer that checked out with our correct digital display on the GTO.