Shock Sensor Question

[Steve.Flanagan at VerizonWireless.com]

Anyone have a brainstorm of an inexpensive shock sensor.

Linear position sensor are on the order of $180 US per sensor, as you can
see this gets expensive  for 2 and maybe 4 sensors (front and back).

I had thought of using a rotary pot, with a  pulley, return spring, you get
the idea, but from speaking with someone who mentioned they tried something
similar, they said the rotary pots do not react fast enough for the
frequencies that the shock moves.  Instead of the Rotary Pot, how about
interfacing an optical sensor from a PC mouse in its place,  does anyone
have an idea if the mouse optical sensor could be made to react fast enough?


I have been thinking of maybe a different optical approach, but I do not
know the easiest way to do this.  Maybe a pulsed light / laser, to a
reflector, measure the round trip time, speed of light should handle any
frequencies that a shock can move at.  

Do some of you engineers out there have any good ideas that we could tackle
to try to build a cheap way to measure shock position on a Drag race car.

Thanks

Steve F
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