Gorman Motorsports

Our shop Spec E30 needed a little gauge and data upgrade after it came back from a brand new paint job and a newly freshened motor installed.

After some thought, we decided to run an AiM MXL dash in place of any gauges. We fabricated a custom dash panel to mount the dash. Since we removed all of the stock gauges we needed to replace all the same functionality with just the AiM dash. An oil pressure sensor, water temp sensor, and ECU connections have been plumbed. Speed is gathered via GPS and RPM comes from the ECU. The entire wiring loom was removed and has been trimmed back and any wiring not needed has been removed. The stock ECU has been retained per the SE30 rules. We utilized the new GPS05 sensor for GPS signal to provide both a speed and heading signal, but also to provide beacon-less operation.

The car also has Chasecam PDR100 plus SS1000 for a two camera video setup. Custom power delivery fusing and cables were used for both the PDR100 but also radio and AiM MXL dash.

Communications is done via a Motorola PM400 Mobile radio, steering wheel mounted PTT button, whip antenna, and IMSA style driver connections.

We plan a whole host of new data oriented upgrades including sensors to measure diff lockup, brake pressure, steering angle, throttle position, and whatever else we can come up with.

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This car came to us to add a proper dash, data acquisition, sensors, video and some power wiring. We went with an AiM system including the powerful MXL Pista dash, SmartyCam, GPS, and sensor package. Gorman Motorsports used our decision matrix to help the customer choose the best data package to go with for their needs. AiM fit the bill perfectly.

The dash was mounted up using a in-house designed custom bracket to mate with the existing mounting flanges on the steering column. The MXL was mounted to the plate and is perfectly situated for ease of driver view. The system used the new GPS05 module that now comes with the SmartyCam. In this configuration, the GPS can me connected to the dash or the camera directly. The camera was mounted on the passenger side using a roll-bar mount.

A number of sensors for both driver improvement and car/motor monitoring were installed. The car is equipped with a Tilton master cylinder that allows adjustable brake bias, so we installed dual brake pressure sensors and stainless hardware to measure both front and rear brake pressure. Custom aluminum brackets were fabricated to hold the brake pressure sensors in place. The system was also augmented with oil temperature and oil pressure sensors in the engine bay using our Gorman Motorsports adapter kit. RPM and throttle position were picked up from the ECU via a custom Mil-spec ECU cable using binder connectors to seamlessly mate with the AiM harness.

The dash was configured to show various alarms for oil pressure and temp. The sensors were setup and calibrated. The RPM level was calibrated and the shift lights set.

The camera was setup with a basic gauge package and the channels from the MXL were configured to show on the video by default. One of the nice features of the SmartyCam is the gauges are overlaid in real time, and thus no post processing of the video is needed. This install is no exception.

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This car is campaigned in the IMSA GT3 Cup series as well as accomplished a win at the 2009 25 Hours of Thunderhill. Gorman Motorsports has provided MoTeC support for the effort. We installed and configured the brake pressure sensors and steering angle sensors to match how the car is delivered from the factory. Lots of wiring into the stock loom, some custom machining and other bits were done. We also performed all the MoTeC ADL2 dash configuration and upgrades. We did everything from fuel prediction, predictive timing, shift light customization and more. We also did all the wiring and configuration for the Chasecam integration with MoTeC. MoTeC controls the on/off and start/stop of the Chasecam video unit. The Chasecam unit is a PDR100R with Deutsch Autosport connectors and all wiring is mil-spec with Raychem boots and shrink. Gorman Motorsports is also responsible for the Bosch Modus configurations when needed for things like pit speed limit, etc. In terms of communications, Gorman Motorsports has supplied the team with radios from Racing Radios.

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