I was just watching a short Grand Prix clip and I find it laughable a person could possibly be making all the switches by hand. Is there some sort of software-hardware link with the cars and the track that technologically tracks which cars are in which position and how does that work? Like the race track isn’t a straight line or anything so it’s hard to imagine how it works.
In: Technology
There are roughly 20 places on any Formula 1 track where there are sensors embedded in the track. Thats enough to automatically update the positioning, and also the time intervals, every 5 seconds or so.
The cars also have GPS on board, but as far as I can tell, that is only used for the moving-dots-on-the-circuit-infographic. While the sensor data is used for official rules purposes (mosty for the Virtual Safety Car, but also sometimes for things like determining the positioning after a red flag), it appears that GPS is not precise enough for that, and therefore relegated to the infographic thing.
All professional cars broadcast telemetry these days, so there will be a computer that knows where each car is, what direction it’s pointing and how fast it’s traveling
From that, the timing team can publish real time results
This is what the pundits are referring to when they call positions
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