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Instrumentation Arrives - More from George Wallace on Chrysler’s Race Car Testing 8
I had been interested in race car
instrumentation even before 1964. There was 9 nstrumentation
very little instrumentation available at
Chrysler that would work in a race car. In
1963.1 tried a wind up clockwork
accelerometer recorder in a Ramchargers drag
car and got a little bit of data. In May of
1964.1 tried some cheap chart recorders in a
Nichels car at a test in Atlanta. But there was
never any adequate equipment. I told
everyone in the race program that we needed Brush Recorder
Original “Black Box”
instrumentation. In 1968, the Chrysler 6 channel
Aerospace operation had slowed down since
their design and manufacturing work in the
Later trunk
Apollo space program was being completed. mounted
Bill Wright of the Huntsville aerospace*group? instrumentation
had approached Engineering in Highland Park box. Wiring for sensors
looking for work they could do. Someone put
two and two together and asked if they could
do race car instrumentation.

It started out with a simple test at Darlington
during practice for the 1968 Southern 500. Bill and one instrumentation technician had driven over from Huntsville with a two
channel Brush recorder and a 12 volt to 11- volt AC power inverter. The object was to see if this would work in a race car
environment.

Larry Rathgeb and I met them for breakfast at a coffee shop in Darlington on Thursday morning and we discussed what we could
do. Larry had talked to Harry Hyde who said we could try it in practice. (Originally the plan was to put it in Cotton Owens’ car.
But Cotton decided he didn’t want holes drilled in his car.) We decided that we needed a box to fit everything in the car, so we
built the famous “black box” behind the motel using wood and tools from a local hardware store. Later in the day, we put the
equipment and box in Harry’s car and it worked. We would have liked to get engine speed, but were worried about taking an
ignition signal in case it caused ignition problems. There was a lot of electrical and mechanical noise, but that would be taken
out. We had a package that would work

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Three weeks later, at a test scheduled at Daytona, Huntsville installed the Brush recorder in our test car (Charger) #046 with better
sonsors to measure engine speed, manifold vacuum and vehicle yaw. The yaw was measured using an angle of attack sensor
from a Saturn rocket. These results were the first real data we had on the performance of a car at Daytona at racing speeds.
Before that, riding in the race car was the only method I had to tell what was going on.

Based on these results, we tested four different aircraft tape data recorders at the next Daytona test. I think we sent the cars out to
do ten wide open laps or so for each unit. The aircraft people initially felt that an automotive application would be very easy to