What MyChron Channels Actually Matter (and Which to Ignore)

Your MyChron logs a dozen channels, but only four drive lap-time analysis: GPS speed, RPM, lateral G, and longitudinal G. Water temp and EGT matter for engine health and jetting, not for where you are losing time. If you are short on attention, ignore the rest and master those four.

It is easy to drown in data. A MyChron 5 or 6 will happily show you ten or more channels, and most of them feel like they should matter. In practice, a small group does the heavy lifting for driving, and the others are there for the engine, not the driver. Here is how to tell them apart.

Which MyChron channels matter most?

These are the channels that tell you where lap time is hiding, roughly in order of how often you will use them.

What is the single most useful channel?

GPS speed. If you only ever learn to read one trace, make it this one. Overlay your fastest lap against a slower one and the speed trace tells the whole story: where you carried more speed, where you gave it back, and how low your minimum speed dropped in each corner. Minimum corner speed in particular is one of the highest-value numbers in karting, because a kart with no differential punishes you twice for scrubbing speed mid-corner. You can read more in reading your MyChron speed trace.

Do I need RPM if I have speed?

Yes, but for different reasons. Speed tells you the outcome. RPM tells you about the engine and gearing. Watch RPM at the end of the longest straight to see if you are over-geared or under-geared, and watch it on corner exit to spot a bog where the engine fell out of its powerband. On a shifter kart, RPM also confirms your shift points. A senior TaG package like an IAME X30 will spin to roughly 16,000 RPM, a Rotax senior to around 13,000 to 14,000, so learn the ceiling for your own engine and read against it.

What about lateral and longitudinal G?

These two are how you read the driver on a kart. Because there is no brake or throttle sensor, the accelerometer is your input trace. Longitudinal G shows braking as deceleration and acceleration as positive G. Lateral G shows cornering load. A clean, committed corner looks like a smooth arc of lateral G rather than a jagged one, and the transition from braking to cornering shows up as the longitudinal trace handing off to the lateral trace. We cover this in finding your braking points and corner entry vs exit.

Which channels can I usually ignore?

For driving analysis, you can set these aside most of the time:

• Water temp: important for engine health and for confirming your session was run in a consistent window, but it does not point to lost lap time.
• EGT: exhaust gas temperature is a jetting and tuning tool on a two-stroke, where you watch for a lean condition. It is a setup channel, not a driving channel.
• Battery and internal channels: housekeeping. Useful if something is wrong, irrelevant when you are hunting tenths.

None of these are useless. They are simply answering a different question than “where am I slow?”

How many channels should I export?

Export all of them. Storage is free and you never know which channel you will want later. The advice to ignore channels is about where you point your attention during analysis, not about what you save. When you export from Race Studio, select every channel. The steps are in how to export MyChron data from Race Studio.

Once your file is in, a tool built for karting will surface the channels that matter and keep the rest out of your way. That is one of the differences in the best MyChron analysis apps: they decide what to show you so you do not have to.