Ever watch auto racing and see in-car camera shots with telemetry data displayed at the bottom of the screen? Ever played the Gran Turismo video games and used the nerdy performance analysis features that show track position and race "footage" superimposed over acceleration data?

I'm an amateur racer and I've recently started using a pair of Palm PDAs as data acquisition devices hooked up to accelerometers and my car's "brain". I then dump the data to a laptop (which I wouldn't want to subject to the in-car vibration environment) for graphic analysis.

I'd like to set up a poor man's (or at least poorer than doctor's and lawyer's) version of something like Pi Research's "Pi Vids" system, which puts synchronized video in one quadrant of a laptop data display. I've also looked at Datacam's product, which displays various channels of data superimposed on the video. The former seems like it would be more informative than the latter.

What hardware and software would you recommend for such a project? Is there a slick way to sychronize the video and data? My dream result would have everything tied together so, when you move a cursor to a different period of the data record, the video flickers by and jumps to the right frame to resume playback at that point in time.

To automate the merging process of the elements, will I need to become familiar with a video-manipulating programming language, or can it be reasonably be done just with editing software that has already been written? Any recommended reading suggestions would also be appreciated.

I haven't even bought the DV camcorder yet. Your responses could influence the way the whole system shapes up.

Thanks, in advance.
-Rick