F1 Pit Stop In 2-Seconds: An In-Depth Analysis (2017) [video] | Hacker News Reader

F1 Pit Stop In 2-Seconds: An In-Depth Analysis (2017) [video]

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117 pointsmkmk53 comments

An interesting thing to note about F1 pit crews is that they aren’t just F1 pit crews - each member of the crew has other roles in the team, mostly mechanics, but also engineers, technicians, and even lorry drivers.

As someone who's been a fun of formula 1 for the first two decades of my life (mid 80s and after), essentially since I was born, and then completely got bored of the sport, I'm astonished of how much action there is in a sport that nowadays fails to deliver any action to viewers, unless you count crashes, but that's not really a very good reason to watch the sport.

You should have a look at MotoGP. 2 wheels as opposed to 4, but it delivers on many race weekends.

Seconded, MotoGP has been excellent lately

Agreed! I omitted this in my original comment, but that's exactly what I did many years ago :-)

For some years I would watch both, but then I just got bored of F1 and only kept watched 2 wheels. Now I don't have so much spare time and when I do I prefer to invest it I other things, but once in a while is always funny to watch a 2 wheels race (motogp, superbike or anything really)

you should watch the first italian gp this year

What a race!

Only really exciting because of Leclerc’s crash (and Hamilton’s pit lane penalty). Same story with Mugello. The following problems have been getting worse year after year, and it’s gotten to the point where nobody can get within DRS range of a Mercedes unless it’s having some sort of problem.

True. I find it terribly hard to give up, but now I find the 5 minute official F1 recap on Youtube is a much better use of my time than two hours of watching whatever Mercedes car is driving in clean air open up double digit seconds leads.

Was in a similar place but drive to survive (Netflix) got me right back into it!

Both seasons of that series are awesome, and actually made me an F1 fan.

Indeed, the hybrid era has been a complete washout. Hamilton is a great driver, but any mid level driver could win the driver's championship in a Mercedes car.

Also impressive: They can do it repeatedly in a very short time span (double stack) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UUN62poXEHs

So beautiful!

That's incredible!

I haven't seen Formula 1 race in a long time.

Watching the video, I initially was very impressed that the industry came up with some almost-instant refuelling technique.

Less impressed now, after finding out that refuelling has not been a thing for over 10 years...

There was a string of bad pit accidents associated with refueling so they banned it

What do they do, switch out cars or have enough fuel for the entire race?

they're allowed 110kg of fuel, and maximize their savings with pre-tuned ECM profiles when passing isn't prioritized.

no extra cars.

Refuelling was banned because 1) it was dangerous, and 2) Ferrari at the time was dominating with Schumacher, they had perfected a technique based on multiple refuelling stops during the race that most other teams couldn’t employ (they had different tire manufacturers that couldn’t match Bridgestone’s performance on short stints). So F1 banned refuelling and moved to a single tire manufacturer for everyone (as well as banning in-season tests, which only Ferrari and a couple of other teams could afford).

Bernie Ecclestone and Max Mosley, for all their shortcomings, were absolutely ruthless when it came to nerfing teams to guarantee competition. After they left the scene we’ve had almost a decade of complete dominance by one team.

Mercedes have been nerfed plenty of times. They’ve just been good enough to deal with it. Ferrari were cheating for most of 2019, and all it did was make Mercedes even stronger.

2 seconds? That’s kinda slow. Haha

Red Bull Racing did 1.82 last season. https://youtu.be/b1f51TOXWik

This is more interesting to watch than the race itself.

I'm surprised that there isn't more software automation. For example, the bolts align faster with better engineering but the pit lane gate at the end of the video is manually controlled. There seems to be a lot of mechanical cleverness, but not much software automation.

Is this because it's part of the sport/culture or maybe there isn't much to gain from software automation?

A lot of this is driven by the technical regulations, in order to keep some parity between teams with varying budgets. Most, if not all teams have as much software automation on the pitstop equipment (you can see the front jack release triggers the green light in the video!)

> you can see the front jack release triggers the green light in the video!

Actually, the amazing thing is that it's manually activated.

The video explains that there is one person in charge of making sure that everyone has finished and there were no problems, which then activates the green light.

In addition, there's a second person watching the lane, to check that no cars are incoming. This one even overrides the first switch if necessary.

Because watching flawlessly automated pit stops and cars with autopilot race is not very exciting.

A long time ago, in a galaxy far away, Formula 1 was also supposed to deliver cutting edge tech into mass-produced cars, besides just being a racing event. I think that (semi-)automated gas/charging stations would have been great to have, from both safety and convenience perspectives.

I think some nuances are missing from the video. Some teams use a system to detect torque on the wheel gun[0]. When it reaches a certain level, it means the wheel is attached securely. If this happens with all the wheels, then the pit stop is complete and green light can be shown to the driver.

Needless to say, I have witnessed "sensor errors" botch up a perfectly fine pit stop.

0: https://www.formula1.com/en/latest/article.fia-to-present-pi...

Is it just me, or does the pit signal turn green when there are still several pit crew members standing in front of the car? 1.85s into the stop or @5m56s in the video.

https://youtu.be/tFwcq5lf0wU?t=356

I'd imagine, for optimal timing, that it's choreographed to go green at the time the driver should begin going for the pedal. There'll presumably be some reaction time and engine latency that's accounted for in the dance.

As I understand things, the driver is meant to hold the brakes (red light) to aid in tire changing and when the green signal is given, the driver is still liable to wait for the front jack to drop the car.

In regards to reaction time, an NHRA drag racing pro tree perfect reaction time is 0.400 seconds. (Edit: this was poorly phrased; a perfect reported RT is still 0.000, but it’s 400ms from the amber lights.)

I suspect the F1 teams have figured how to shave fractions of a second of reaction time by pipelining the release signal and the final crew members clearing.

For drag racing the green light goes on 0.4 seconds after the last orange light, so you need to react in 0.4 seconds to leave at the green light (in practice you need to react much earlier to account for the time it takes the car to leave). That time doesn't actually reflect their actual reaction time though, humans have a much faster reaction time than that.

Mildly related F1 fact: the green light at the start line comes on a random amount of time after the final red light comes on. This interval can be between 1 and 9 seconds.

Interestingly, the actual release signal to start an F1 race is the red lights going out, not the green lights coming on.

The green lights release the cars to the pre-race formation lap.

There haven't been green lights at the start for many years now. The start signal is the red lights going out.

But you're right about the randomization (although I don't think 9 seconds is right, I've never seen it take nearly as long as that)

This is sort of normal for any FIA standing start. Green light comes on at a pre start chosen, fixed interval between 0.2 to 3 seconds after last red light goes.

F1 has its own dedicated specific rules not seen in any other circuit racing.

Rolling start involves green light coming on at about 50m from the start / finish line and if stays red, start is aborted.

On a pro tree, the three amber lights all come on together with a 0.4 second delay to green. On a sportsman tree, they come on in sequence 0.5 seconds apart and the green is 0.5 seconds from the last amber light on a sportsman tree.

This is triggered by sensors on wheel guns and the front jack. From the driver's perspective, this could even be sooner, as it'll take a while (~200ms) to react to the green light.

The guy in the video spends several minutes talking about how two of the members of the pit crew are responsible for changing the signal to green.

If I understand correctly they are both right, it's a consensus system, i.e. the light will turn green once all inputs are GO

AFAIK the regs state that the signal for 'green' needs to have a human input, the wheel guns now mostly (video is from 2017) have torque sensors which inform a 'green' state when the human lets go of their switch.

Each team does things differently, but the front teams have a CAN network for pit equipment states to be shared for some form of automation.

(I currently work in F1)

Is there a way I can contact you? I am writing a short article on human factors and last weekend's lap 7 safety car restart.

Of course, happy to chat. If you put my username in front of @signal.bio, you can email me

Ha, your nickname and a bit of googling gives away what you do in F1. Fascinating to bump into someone of your position on HN...

I remember seeing an online photo of your work car parked in a street, and someone said you actually drive that car in your civilian life, is that true?

Ha that would be hilarious, but is unfortunately not true :)

There is a very good replica of the previous gen car in the Netherlands. I wouldn't enjoy driving it daily due to the noise https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WVlgw90Ns7c&ab_channel=19Boz...

Just another big F1 fan (I've watched every race since Mansell won the world championship).

Thank you for helping keep the sport safe, both with Sensor Biometric and the medical car driving. I remember Martin Brundle doing a great piece on the medical car.

I was vaguely aware of the biometric glove tech but looks super cool now I'm reading more about it.

Does the wheel nut stay on the wrench, or is it like NASCAR where the new wheel has nuts glued on, ready for tightening?

Just saw: NASCAR is going to center-locks next year. And the nut will be retained by the wheel, so no more glue.

https://www.nascar.com/news-media/2020/03/02/nascar-single-l...

The nut is part of the wheel assembly. They have a fairly complex retaining system on each wheel hub, in case of a cross-threaded nut and unsafe car release.

Impressive, but of course during the entire pit stop the driver loses much more time because of braking and accelerating. I wonder how significant the 2 seconds are compared to the entire time lost.

It doesn't matter because lead-time is fungible. Saving 250ms in a pit gains you 250ms on an opponent who also has to brake and accelerate.

Yeah, in total there is a 20-25 seconds loss or so depending on circuit, so 2 secs aren’t too many percents of that but with the same tire strategy chances are your opponent has to pit as often too, so... (and this is venturing into the F1 strategy world with undercuts etc) And with these things evened out, seconds can matter although it’s usually no disaster even with a 4-5 secs stop unless you’re in a tight spot or with little of the race left. Races can quickly start to get ruined for each second after this though.

Where a sub-second difference matters is if the 20s pit stop is the limit to slotting in before your approaching competitor. Track position or lack of it has cost many titles. Undercut and overcut depend on precise pit timings to succeed.

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