We Become World Champs, Sort of, with Help from Racelogic's VBox HD Lite Pro Data Logger

In 1988, the fearless French World Rally Championship driver Michèle Mouton co-founded the Race of Champions. The inaugural event celebrated a decade of WRC with an Olympic-style competition among eight drivers, including such Group B legends as Walter Röhrl and Timo Salonen. For more than a decade, the annual competition took place on Spain's gorgeous Gran Canaria island. Racelogic, maker of the VBOX data loggers we use to measure performance data of test vehicles, invited us and nine other car nerds from across the globe to the Canary Islands for a faux Race of Champions. While there, we'd evaluate its VBOX HD Lite Pro video data logger under especially grueling conditions.

The Maspalomas Circuit is a lot of back and forth. The layout is like the bridge of melted goo that's been stretched between both halves of a grilled cheese sandwich. Its asphalt runs west to east along the Atlantic Ocean coast twice per lap. Three of the four turns are hairpins—Turn 1 requires some especially careful braking control to avoid upsetting the car and smooching the outer wall.

A restricted-use airport separates its alternative layouts, and the condensed version we battled on is approximately 1.4 miles long. The taxiway for the embedded aeródromo butts up against the straightaway just before the final turn's giant sweep, and we were able to nod goodbye to a departing single-prop Tecnam during our second race.

The first morning of our two-day track event started much like a NASA high-performance driver education weekend in the United States. We walked the track with instructors, four of whom maintain the keys to Supercar Gran Canaria, for tourists seeking something more exciting to drive on the island than a Fiat Panda rental. Walking the course revealed the elevation changes that you can't easily see from Google Earth. The entire front straight is actually a slow climb, before reaching the highest point at Turn 1.

Driver Education in Paradise

During the conversation with the guys who live and breathe the Maspalomas Circuit, I learned that before our instructor, Andy Robinson, was yelling "Brake now!" at students for his day job, he was shouting "Hold this ground, lads!" as a voice actor for the Medevil first-person pole-axe video game Chivalry 2.

In keeping with the spirit of the real Race of Champions, the 10 of us were split into teams as representatives of our homelands. Car and Driver played for the USA with the help of Grassroots Motorsports, joined by other journalists and influencers from Italy, France, Portugal, and Spain. While each team wore different-colored shirts, it was immediately obvious by the size of our racing uniforms who played for Team America. We'd eventually make up for the multiple Xs on our tags with successful positioning on the racetrack.

Race cars were chosen blindly by pulling keys out of a velvet bag, each of them belonging to a different second-gen Mazda MX-5 Miata. Some had 15-inch wheels, others 16s. Each machine had varying level of body reshaping from previous racing incidents. Wooden lattice replaced broken headlights, with zip ties in place of bolts and plastic anchors and the odd shiny new radiator or anti-roll-bar end link here or there. I was surprised to discover that all of the Miatas were right-hand drive with five-speed manual transmissions—having only ever shifted gears with my right palm.

The brutal weather effect known as a Calima brought relentless 95-degree heat carried by winds off Africa's Sahara desert, some 135 miles away. Before the end of the first warmup lap, the thermostat of my Miata had entered the danger zone. To avoid boiling the cooling system, I decided to run the heater at full blast to help circulate coolant and keep the engine a little less miserable, a little trick picked up from driving my own misfit toys.

Full heat blasting on a 95-degree day is nothing short of awful, but it was a worthwhile sacrifice if it gave me any advantage over the global competitors. Our initial outing on the track showed me at about a 1:29.44, but after a few laps with instructors, I shaved about three seconds from that. From there, it was all about fine-tuning where we were braking, and that's where the data logger with video really shined.

While comparing data with the Grassroots Motorsports editor, the Racelogic team pointed out there were two corners where I'd been braking too early. I had started my braking just before the cone used as a marker started to leave my peripheral vision. The Grassroots guy was braking later. The collected time loss was about eight-tenths of a second on some laps. I was still able to manage the quicker lap, but braking later would make me tougher to catch.

Schmos Using the HD Lite Pro

While my fellow American and I worked on shortening our braking zones on the track, the Racelogic team shuffled microSD cards from a nearby paddock tent to prevent that precious data from turning into soup.

A VBOX HD Lite Pro, Racelogic's video data logger, was mounted in each of the cars. This would provide video automatically synced to the data from our lap time, which is tracked via an antenna that updates the GPS location 10 times each second. The device, which is no bigger than a fist, can either be plugged into a 12-volt supply such as a cigarette lighter or mounted directly to the battery, as our cars had been set up. We experienced zero connection issues or faults the entire two days despite the grueling Spanish heat.

The VBOX HD Lite Pro automatically starts recording when the car begins to move. As someone who has spent many years corralling the flurry of beeping GoPro Hero cameras during our annual Lightning Lap track feature, the silence of the VBOX HD Lite Pro is bliss. There's no screen to fiddle with; nor is there the possibility of discovering on Lap 4 that you didn't accept the terms of service, therefore preventing video and data from beginning to record. It just works. You can add a Racelogic OLED display, but our cars weren't so equipped.