Reading a Speed Trace

If you only ever learn to read one piece of F1 telemetry, make it the speed trace. It looks intimidating — a jagged line rising and falling across the screen — but it's just a map of how fast the car is going at every point of the lap. The horizontal axis is distance around the circuit, from the start/finish line back to it. The vertical axis is speed. Read it left to right and you're effectively driving the lap.

The peaks are the straights, where the car reaches top speed. The valleys are the corners, where the driver brakes and slows down. A deep, sharp valley is a slow corner like a hairpin; a shallow dip is a fast, barely-lifted sweep. The shape of each valley tells a story: how late the driver braked, how hard, the minimum speed they carried through the corner, and how early they got back on the power.

The real power comes from overlaying two drivers on the same trace. Where the lines sit on top of each other, the cars are equally matched. Where one line is higher, that driver is faster at that point — maybe braking later into a corner, maybe carrying more entry speed, maybe running less wing for more straight-line pace. Sometimes a driver is quicker in the corners but slower on the straights, which usually means a different setup trade-off. The trace shows you the where and hints at the why.

Watch for the flat-topped sections on the straights — those are often where DRS is open, adding several km/h of top speed. And remember that the fastest lap isn't always the one that's quickest everywhere; it's the best compromise across the whole lap.

In the Telemetry Explorer, pick a session and overlay up to four drivers' speed traces on one chart — the gaps between the lines are exactly where the lap time is won and lost.