What is a Rolling Road?

A rolling road is a tool used in many garages for tuning of performance cars.

It consists of a large set of concrete rollers for the car to run on, a braking system for the rollers, usually electronic, and a display unit to show the power produced. The electronic brake resists the power of the engines to drive the wheels.

When the throttle is fully depressed and the brake holds the speed steady, the power used by the brake is equal to the power produced by the car. The traditional method of using a rolling road is to hold the speed steady at 500 rpm intervals and record the reading of the display unit manually.

To record details over the whole of the cars range took several minutes.

As the car was not moving, even with large (4 foot high) fans in front of the car, the engine became very hot.
The mechanic would then make adjustments to the set up of the car engine to improve the performance and repeat the whole performance to measure the improvement. This performance was costly in terms of time, not good for the car engine and too coarse in measurement steps.
It also meant the mechanic would have a tendency to perform many tuning steps before retesting, making it difficult to know which steps were having positive effects.

How does our system improve this?

Our rolling road data acquisition system simplifies the whole process.
The mechanic sits in the car and controls the operation from a handset by getting the car in the correct gear for the run, pressing the start button and putting his foot to the floor.

The car then accelerates with a power reading being taken every 20 rpm and displayed on the monitor in real time. When the car has visually gone past it's peak power the operator stops the run using the handset and brakes the car.

The run takes only 10 to 20 seconds depending on the power of the car.

This improves the repeatability of the runs as the engine does not overheat, which causes power loss. The mechanic can then make a small adjustment to the tuning of the car and repeat the run.

As the run can be overlaid on the previous run any changes are immediately obvious. The runs can also be saved, along with details of the car to be retrieved for comparison on a subsequent visit or printed in a before/after fashion to show the customer the results of the tuning operation.

Click here to show a run produced using the software.

Our system is designed to work with Hofmann and Sun Rolling Roads.

See for yourself!

To see more you can download a demonstration copy of our software from our downloads area today. The software is fully functional and includes some sample data so you can evaluate its functionality.

Please download a copy and see for yourself!