They mostly use it to derive speed and distance to locate events on the track instead of just on the clock. Ron, when you get the data into Excel you see things differently from the GUI on Racepak. Most people seem to prefer looking at graphs rather than tables. Perhaps move them around from race to race. The EGTs seem to be the single most useful thing to monitor.
Problems tend to show up in EGTs before they appear elsewhere.
Well, you'd have a 1 in 4 chance that if something went wrong in a particular race that it would happen in a channel you were looking at. You could also make sure that they were consistent from one race to the next. Most of the systems do tend to be custom, for the Top Fuel teams. They all want to look at something a little different. Yes, for balancing it especially.