I thought you all might be interested in this thing:

http://www.carchip.com

It's a little chip about the size of your thumb that plugs into the OBDII port and records up to 300 hours of data, from acceleration and RPMs to Intake air temperature and battery voltage. When you're done recording you take it out and plug it into your computer and it downloads all of the data in graph form. $179. Seems quite convenient. I'd assume it would be for recording your own track times as you don't have to worry about having your laptop in the way and tons of wires dangling all over the car.