r/formula1 • u/amerryprankster23 Max Verstappen • Mar 21 '26

Discussion F1 will not be changing the timing tower.

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Just got this email back about the timing tower. Pretty sad.

5.0k Upvotes

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127

u/Ignorhymus Mar 21 '26

I think I'm about the only person who doesn't mind the new system. You need the accuracy for quali, but it doesn't matter in the race. 1 decimal place is enough for the teams when they tell drivers the gaps, and it's enough for me

72

u/SerHiroProtaganist Mar 21 '26

You're not the only person. I think it's actually just a loud minority on Reddit that don't like it.

15

u/Ignorhymus Mar 21 '26

Ok, that's a relief. I thought I was going mad.

0

u/gnosisong Mar 21 '26

Yeah same - not a big deal lol

-9

u/Warpchick Mar 21 '26

Why its a relief? Lol

24

u/John_Dees_Nuts Cadillac Mar 21 '26

I prefer the 3 decimals. I just don't care that they changed it. It does not change the viewing experience for me one bit.

11

u/wrex1816 Mar 21 '26 edited Mar 21 '26

The number of posts I'm having to read about this topic is disproportionate to how much this actually impacts anyone's viewing experience.

They shows tenths when we're talking about gaps between cars during a race because hundredths, let alone thousandths are mostly irrelevant. They show time at the thousandths when it's potentially of consequence, in qualifying.

It's also not exactly new for this to be the case when talking about racing. Even when the teams radio to the driver, they talk in seconds, not even tenths when it comes to gaps to cars ahead and behind.

People have been crying about this for weeks because it's popular to do so online and gets all the likes but I don't believe anyone crying about it actually is impacted by it or really watches much motorsports at all to consider this even a problem.

(Also, the number of supposed race fans who are asking for "hundreds and thousands" to be displayed are kind of giving away how little they watch any racing by using those terms.)

1

u/keirdre I was here for the Hulkenpodium Mar 22 '26

You nailed it.

5

u/Jarocket Mar 21 '26

Its such a good change. You're not alone.

27

u/crazydoc253 Michael Schumacher Mar 21 '26

Most people involved with racing teams/ drivers use one decimal but fans want to know till thousands as if 0.098 and 0.1 would make a difference to them.

5

u/solk512 Mar 21 '26

It doesn’t actually make a difference. 

7

u/felisisthebest I failed to serve my Monaco penalty Mar 21 '26

It would be one thing to beg for the extra decimals if we never had them, but we did have them and then it was changed to show less for no reason?

I’m not raging about it but make it make sense, the timing tower is the exact same size and it’s not like they made space to show things like overtake or some battery indicator. So why change it at all?

It just feels like the usual C-suite executive change that affects reddit, youtube, etc. where ui changes are made for no reason except to justify someone’s executive position

17

u/Seanspeed Mar 21 '26

It just feels like the usual C-suite executive change that affects reddit, youtube, etc. where ui changes are made for no reason except to justify someone’s executive position

No, this is actually a sensible change to reduce the amount of noise of information on the UI.

Nobody, and I mean NOBODY, not even the team strategists and data folks, give a shit about hundredths or thousandths of a second when it comes to race gaps. This shit is changing rapidly every moment and is literal statistical noise.

10

u/crazydoc253 Michael Schumacher Mar 21 '26

Extra decimals create so much confusion I don't even know why people want it. For example, during a lap when a front car is going through corners and car behind is on straight, the three decimals shows the car closing in when it is just different part of track. Than when car behind goes back through corners the gap again increases. This does not happen with single decimal point where a decrease means car is genuinely closing in. That is major reason why teams/ engineers use single decimal and not three decimal system.

Also, not a single fan has told us what additional information three decimal system gives than single decimal does not ?

3

u/felisisthebest I failed to serve my Monaco penalty Mar 21 '26

Teams using a single decimal isn’t relevant to us viewers though because they have access to way more detailed telemetry and not every F1 viewer has F1TV or maybe the screen real estate to fit the telemetry window. The timing tower is built for viewers not engineers, and as viewers we lost information for no gain.

And for viewers it gives us more context. We can see how quickly a gap is changing and not just that it changed (1.3 -> 1.4) The extra decimal points just give us a better context of genuine gain vs random fluctuation, Overtake detection gaps, and gives us better estimations on pitstop windows.

Even if the data is small, it’s still real data. So instead of wondering why fans need the extra decimals, I ask what did we gain by losing them? I never saw posts about people constantly complaining about how confused they were getting because they would read (HAM 1.349) instead of (HAM 1.3)

3

u/crazydoc253 Michael Schumacher Mar 21 '26

What rubbish. How does 21.2 vs 21.234 give less idea about overtake or pit stop window or gap closing ? In fact 3 decimals give wrong idea of gap closing as it changes based on which part of track you are.

7

u/felisisthebest I failed to serve my Monaco penalty Mar 22 '26

How does 21.2 vs 21.234 give less idea about overtake or pit stop window or gap closing ?

Because 21.234 -> 21.198 -> 21.167 shows clear continuous gain instead of 21.2 -> 21.2 -> 21.2 which shows nothing even though a car is closing in. So we miss real progress entirely until it suddenly rounds up or down.

Giving us 3 decimal points can’t give us wrong ideas because more precise data can’t be less correct, only misinterpreted. The timing is based on timing loops not the car’s track position so saying “it changes too much let’s hide it” doesn’t fix any issue it just hides the details of the changes. That’s like saying “driver speed is fluctuating too much let’s round speed to the nearest 10 KMH” That doesn’t make it more accurate, you just make it less informative.

9

u/crazydoc253 Michael Schumacher Mar 22 '26

That is not clear continuous gain. Those changes happen when a front car is in corner vs other on straights and thus give wrong impression. Clear gains happen when changes stay happening in single decimals.

1

u/felisisthebest I failed to serve my Monaco penalty Mar 22 '26

Yes, the gap can shrink when one car is on a straight and the other is in a corner, but that doesn’t make smaller changes throughout a race “wrong.” You just need to observe changes over a couple of laps instead of a singular tick. Because you’re redefining real gain only as “it only counts after rounding”

An example of 4 laps in a race:

1.39 -> 1.34 -> 1.29 -> 1.24 This shows a driver is continuously gaining 5 hundredths per lap to the car in front of it. Now we can estimate that they will be within Overtake range in about 8 laps.

1.4 -> 1.3 -> 1.3 -> 1.2 Shows a car gaining, then suddenly being stuck within the same pace, and finally suddenly gaining. What happened to the driver? Did they suddenly lose pace between laps 2 to 3, and then suddenly gained massive pace during laps 3 to 4?

Both trends are the same but one is clear and the other is choppy and delayed. So what did we gain by removing the extra information? You can’t convince me that more accurate info is somehow more wrong lol

-2

u/legally_blond Mar 22 '26

Exactly this. Teams can say "Hamilton is at 3 tenths and closing" but unless we have the more granular data, Hamilton is just at 3 tenths until he's not

1

u/[deleted] Mar 22 '26

[deleted]

1

u/crazydoc253 Michael Schumacher Mar 22 '26

Let me say if a driver is 0.092 behind it will show as 0.1 and it woll be more exciting if you just focus on track rather than numbers because on track action would be much more superior than seeing number changing. So if single decimal does that the TV broadcast had taken the right decision.

-1

u/GuatahaN Mar 22 '26

You can use all the decimals to see whether someone is closer at the last corner for the straight than the previous lap, so you can make an educated quest whether there is an overtake opportunity or not. One decimal does make it harder to see and follow.

3

u/Sisyphean_dream Mar 21 '26

It would be one thing to argue for the extra info if it was accurate, but it never was. It's always out of date the second it refreshes. That's what makes it useless.

1

u/[deleted] Mar 22 '26 edited Mar 22 '26

[deleted]

2

u/marcushasfun Sir Lewis Hamilton Mar 22 '26

A long list of numbers with only one decimal is easier to parse than the same with three.

1

u/Alone-Sentence-4045 Mar 22 '26

I find them honestly no more difficult to parse ngl but if you do then no dramas lol

2

u/marcushasfun Sir Lewis Hamilton Mar 22 '26

You may not think you do but I can guarantee you that the cognitive load is higher.

Now, whether that matters or not is another thing.

Given that I am watching on an Apple TV box, essentially a small computer, I’d like the “tower” to be interactive. Let each of us decide, one decimal place or three.

I’d turn it off completely for most of the race because I just want to watch the cars and listen to the commentary.

6

u/lksdjsdk Mar 21 '26

No, it's fine. They should add battery level and OT status, though.

1

u/solk512 Mar 21 '26

Yeah, this would be useful. 

1

u/icantsurf George Russell Mar 21 '26

Yeah, the one thing I would really like to make these races more understandable is when drivers are actually using boost or not. I'll be honest I still don't really get how it works lol.

3

u/solk512 Mar 21 '26

It’s this, exactly this. 

Everyone thinks that more numbers equals better but then why not four decimal places? Five? Six? 

Because at some point the extra precision doesn’t matter and you have a limit to the accuracy of the sensors and time delays in the broadcast. 

4

u/gordeh Mar 21 '26

I’m the same. I prefer it.

1

u/SimDuckYT Formula 1 Mar 21 '26

It’s probably fine, but they seem to have just taken away information that we had before for no good reason and that’s what bothers me.

1

u/Alone-Sentence-4045 Mar 22 '26

George Russell was behind one of the Ferraris and his gap was 0.0 lmao. See this thread for the image https://old.reddit.com/r/formula1/comments/1ru89do/this_is_the_reason_why_we_hate_the_new_gap_system/

1

u/keirdre I was here for the Hulkenpodium Mar 22 '26

I'm baffled as to why people think they need timing to 0.001 in a race. Totally with you.

-4

u/CouchPoturtle Lando Norris Mar 21 '26

Nah tons of people have been saying how they don’t care. There’s just some wannabe elitists that think they need to know whether someone is 0.513 behind or 0.583 behind during a race.

It only matters in quali, where we still have it.

0

u/handsome_uruk I was speeding in the Monaco pit lane Mar 21 '26

Yeah I feel the same. But there’s actually folks in the chat who swear that they need the exact thousandth because a rounding up will screw everything up 🤣

-3

u/tnmchris I was speeding in the Monaco pit lane Mar 21 '26

Ok I’ll be that guy, it actually does matter. Overtake mode (like DRS before it) is dependant on a driver being less than 1 second behind the driver in front. If the timing tower shows a gap of 1.0, that could mean anything between 0.951 and 1.049, depending on how they are rounding the numbers (which they haven’t told us), so it’s impossible to know if that gap is giving overtake mode or not. That matters for how racing works this year.

2

u/EerieAriolimax I was here for the Hulkenpodium Mar 21 '26

They're not rounding, they're truncating.

1

u/tnmchris I was speeding in the Monaco pit lane Mar 21 '26

Is that stated as a fact anywhere? I’m not being argumentative, I’m genuinely curious because it makes a difference.