As a full time car reviewer and part time racing driver, I was really excited to experience Garmin's take on a performance driving data capturing and analysis device.
Through my racing, I have experienced other products on the market and two things always stood out:
1) You need to plug into a laptop to capture, correlate and process the data
2) You need to be a race engineer to know what you are looking at and how to draw any conclusions from it.
And off the bat Garmin have nailed that - Catalyst literally is plug, play, review with automatic and immediate data analysis on the touchscreen device - you don't even need to get out the car between sessions.
It makes sense of all those squiggly lines supported with video and still images, giving you suggested areas for improvement and you can choose to hear real-time coaching cues.
And the video quality is great - 1080p HD.
BUT what is important to remember is that Catalyst is focused on improving YOUR ability, not comparing your laps against someome else - so no overlaying of bench time laps / data like you can do on other devices - you are able to set up different profiles though which is handy for those running driver coaching courses.
At each new track you will need to do a couple of installation laps so that Catalyst can get a handle on you and your ability. My concern is this - if I am a complete rookie on track without a clue of the correct racing line, is Catalyst not therefore going to coach me at becoming better / faster on the incorrect line? We were assured that with the GPS mapping built in, Catalyst understands the clipping and turn in points - the fastest and best way around the circuit - so will guide you to the correct lines too.
A good point raised at the launch was that if I had a Pro Drivers lap time as my base on my device, Catalyst would be instructing me to brake very late and carry speed through sections that a rookie wouldn't have the skill set to handle - fair point I guess. Not only dangerous but not helping the individual to improve either.
Look, once they go Cloud Based with this, things will get really interesting because then Garmin would have a massive database at each circuit in all types of cars which would make Catalyst that much more accurate. At the moment, it doesn't understand the specifics of the car that you are in - is it FWD or RWD, what does it weigh and what are realistic cornering and braking G-forces. So I found it asking me to do things like brake later at a corner when I know its beyond what the car was capable of. Also the lines I use through the corners vary based on the drive of the car I am in and Catalyst can't interpret that data now.
But its a damn fantastic package and incredibly well priced too...its a game changer for sure!
