I apologize for being a vague, but it's a 4cyl dirt racer. I realize I could probably perk a few more peoples curiosity here if I were a bit more descriptive (pics, etc.).

The problem is this; A very high percentage of the time (pretty much 100), this sort of thing is frowned upon and considered cheating. Unfortunately it has been confirmed some guys are employing these systems in some form or another.

Other than natural curiosity, the reason I am looking into this is to figure out how this works so we can police it better. We can clearly hear the tone of the engines changing when it kicks in, but beyond that, tech does not know what to look for and we wouldn't know where to point them in the event of a protest.

If all else fails and we still can't get this in check, we may be forced to use it ourselves. Not the route we want to go, but "If you can't beat 'em, join 'em".

 

Okay.... So let me rephrase my question:

Could you perhaps explain what the title of this thread means? What is being launched?

What does this thing supposedly do and how does that translate into an advantage for those that use it?

 

Sorry, I see what you are getting at now.
By launch, I mean standing start. If you break traction and just spin the tires, you go nowhere. What this should do is monitor that slip and adjust the power to the wheels for various conditions.

I think I have the activation part worked out, but this mosfet switch part is over my head right now. It would be much easier if relays were fast enough for this application.

 

Thank you.

One possible way to detect and document its use is to use a directional antenna to aim at the suspected offender and capture the RF noise from the ignition system. If they are suppressing the high voltage discharge of some of the cylinders, that should be discernable from the signal.

If the governing body really wanted to get serious, they could require some type of ignition monitoring during the race. It would be a simple matter to put four inductive probes, of the type used for engine timing, on all the wires and have a recorder record every ignition event. I don't know anything about the races you are talking about, but let's say that the engines wrap at 10,000rpm and the race lasts for an hour. For a 4-cylinder 4-cycle engine, that's 20,000 ignition events per minute or 1.2 million events in the race. Even if event was logged using a 32-bit integer, that is a tiny amount of data these days. Or the monitor could merely keep track of the number of times the firing sequence order was violated.

Now, I suppose one way that the cheaters could get around this would be to suppress entire firing cycles, meaning that the engine would have to make two complete revolutions without any firing events. I wonder if that would be too extreme to be helpful to them. If not, then that would be harder to catch unless rpm information (taken from something other than the ignition system) were incorporated.

 

I really like the sound of that directional rf antenna. That may have to be my next project, lol! Already see people with radar guns for mph, rpm might be nice to know also.

Officials have done nothing, seems they are leaving it up to us to figure out how to deal with it. I doubt they will put any effort into hardware to monitor and prob even more difficult to get it past the competitors.

I think you are correct about cutting too many not being a good idea. There are some gizmos out there that are claimed to be completely undetectable. It is cost prohibitive to buy one just to reverse engineer, if we could even decipher what is going on in there. From what I can gather, sounds like they monitor the derivative of rpm and time. When it sees a jump, it knows the tires broke loose and it kicks in. I do not know if this even requires extra hardware like I am doing or if they are getting fancy and injecting the routine straight into the firmware of the ign controller. I also don't know how exactly this actually lowers the power output. Could just retard timing as opposed to stopping the whole spark event.