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A brief history of F1 time


Try, if you will, to imagine watching an F1 race without the benefit of timing screens.

Who is catching the leader? Dunno. Who is fastest through section two? Dunno. Are the leader’s tyres going off and slowing him down a little? Dunno.

We take precision timing for granted and it provides both teams and spectators with a huge amount of information.

But the catalyst for super-accurate timing in F1 was actually the Le Mans endurance race – and Ferrari founder Enzo Ferrari’s distrust of French timekeepers. More on that shortly…


Second-hand sisters



Until the 1970s, timing in F1 was done by hand. Often, teams would call on drivers’ wives or girlfriends to operate the mechanical stopwatches which were all that was available to measure lap times.

Not surprisingly, there was some variation in ability and the best that could be said for this approach was that it gave teams a rough idea of lap times.

Some of those operating stopwatches were more respected than others. In fact, at the 1971 Italian Grand Prix, the driver on pole position was changed for this very reason.

Ferrari’s Jacky Ickx posted a qualifying lap time of 1:22.82, which was enough to put him in pole position; at least, that is what the papers reported.

After qualifying finished, the Matra team protested – they had a hugely respected professional timekeeper called Michelle Dubosc, who had recorded Matra driver Chris Amon’s fastest lap as 1:22.40.

Dubosc was held in such high esteem that the race directors opted to accept her timing, and Amon started the race from pole (much to the chagrin of the Ferrari fans).

It was clearly not an ideal situation and change was inevitable – and it would be Ferrari who were indirectly responsible.


The times they are a-changin’



In the early 1970s, Enzo Ferrari (pictured with John Surtees) approached the watchmakers at Heuer – he wanted Ferrari to have its own accurate timing equipment for the Le Mans 24 Hours gathering, because he didn’t trust the French timekeepers.

Enzo Ferrari was notoriously tight with money and it was made clear to Heuer that Ferrari wouldn’t be paying for the equipment.

And so, in 1971, a partnership deal was struck that would become common in F1 – Ferrari’s drivers received 25,000 Swiss Francs each year for carrying the Heuer logo on their overalls. They also got a gold Heuer watch, which they picked up from the factory, presenting the watchmakers with a photo opportunity.

Heuer now had the chance to see F1 from inside its biggest team and they took full advantage – in 1974, they became the sport’s official timekeeper, and changed F1 timing forever.



F1’s new time lords



Heuer introduced their Automatic Car Identification Timing System and, although details have changed over the years, this is still at the heart of timing in F1.

Each car carried a small transponder – a box that picked up a radio signal and responded by transmitting an identification signal.

In the early days, this allowed cars to be timed accurately to within one hundredth of a second – a huge step forward from the stopwatch era.

The names of F1’s official timekeepers would change but the technology would remain very similar in principle.

Today, all F1 cars (and safety cars) still carry a transponder, in line with the front axle, and backup transponders in the cockpit area.

When each car drives over a timing loop – effectively, a couple of wires in the track – the transponder sends a unique signal to a central computer, which calculates the timings.

There are timing loops at the start-finish line and at the end of each of the three track sectors, as well as loops in the pitlane.

Using this approach, cars in effect time themselves simply by driving over timing loops.

There are backup systems, of course, including infrared detectors on the starting line so that there’s still some basic timing available even if the main system goes down.


The smallest of margins


As technology has advanced, F1 has measured lap times in smaller and smaller increments – nowadays, we know each lap (and partial lap) time down to one thousandth of a second.

In fact, the equipment can measure to the nearest ten thousandth of a second (0.0001 of a second).

However, when cars set qualifying lap times that are identical to within one thousandth of a second, the car that set the time first is deemed the faster (on the basis that, in general, a track gets quicker to drive on as a race weekend passes).

There have been plenty of F1 races where the winning margin was a fraction of a second – as long ago as 1955, Stirling Moss finished just 0.2seconds ahead of Juan Manuel Fangio at the British Grand Prix (Moss believed Fangio slowed at the last second to let him win, though Fangio always denied this).

Perhaps the most memorable F1 photo-finish came not in a race, though, but in qualifying for the 1997 European Grand Prix, at Jerez.

Ultimately, this race would be remembered as one of the most exciting in F1 history, with title favourite Michael Schumacher crashing out in a failed attempt to ram Jacques Villeneuve (pictured with Schumacher) off the circuit.

But qualifying was remarkable in its own way – the fastest three drivers, Schumacher, Villeneuve and Heinz Harold Frentzen, all recorded qualifying lap times of 1:21.072.

With lap times identical to the nearest one-thousandth of a second, Villeneuve was awarded pole position because he set the time on his first qualifying run.

Schumacher was next, having done his time on the second run, and Frentzen didn’t even start on the front row, having recorded exactly the same time but on his fourth run.

Less than a second separated the top ten on the grid and less than one thousandth of a second separated the top three – that’s why split-second timing is so important to F1.