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VBOXAfrica has brought the Performance Box Touch to South Africa. Now selling at R14 950 across the country, the VBOX PerformanceBox Touch is a product of Racelogic, the global leader in satellite-based datalogging systems for the automotive industry.
It replaces the acclaimed and long-serving VBOX PerformanceBox and, as the name suggests, a key feature of the newcomer is the touch screen. Like its predecessor, it is expected to become the anchor product in the brand’s Motorsport range, thanks to a host of features which will appeal to a broad audience of car testers, racers of all persuasions and anyone who is interested in accurately and scientifically recording vehicle movement.
General Manager, VBOXAfrica, Heinz Böse, said: “We’ve been waiting for the PB Touch for months and like so many things, major delays have been caused by the global pandemic. The original PB served for the best part of a decade and introduced thousands of petrolheads to a simple, accurate and affordable way of measuring things like acceleration, braking and lap times.”
According to Bose, “The Touch version is a marked improvement in every way, not least because of how the global network of satellite systems has expanded, but also the progress made by Racelogic in pairing a tiny antenna on the surface of the planet with those satellites.”
Böse points out that, contrary to popular opinion, GPS is not the correct term to apply to satellites in general – it is the name of a constellation in the same way that GLONASS (the Russian Federation’s constellation) is. The umbrella term for satellites is, in fact, GNSS, which stands for Global Network of Satellite Systems.
“The current-generation products coming from VBOX use both GPS and GLONASS – each network has at least 24 satellites so the vehicle’s position can be determined with an extremely high level of accuracy and consistency. Data is logged 10 times a second and improvements in the processing hardware of the device also prevent bounced signals – for example when a satellite’s incoming signal deflects off a building before reaching the receiver – from affecting positional accuracy,” he explained.
The new PB Touch is therefore not only perfect for straightline testing but is also ideal for lap timing. The Predictive function enables the driver to see exactly whether the current lap is faster or slower than a reference lap. This applies not only to the time taken to a given point but also the current speed versus the reference lap.
As well as providing immediate verification of a performance run or a lap time from the 4.3-inch full-colour screen, the PB Touch simultaneously writes to an SD card, so that information can be analysed later through Racelogic’s Circuit Tools or Vehicle Test Suite software packages.
