Watch F1 and enjoy lots of tech

I love Formula One.  I have been watching F1 for so long I can remember Sir Jackie Stewart driving the Tyrrell, the BBC "coverage" being a 30 minute highlights programme and even before Bernie ruled the roost.  One of the great things about F1 is that over the years the technology has got better and better and thankfully so have the TV coverage.  The cars have had turbo, traction control, instantaneous gear change and camera all over them.  The TV coverage now extends to all practice sessions as well as full live coverage of every race.  However, this is just not enough F1 for me.

When I started watching racing the only way to keep track of the timings was to be at the circuit with a pad, pen and stopwatch.  Indeed one freezing cold May Day at Silverstone I stood on the timings wall as the Formula Ford team I was with was driving very slowly around the track.  My job was to record his lap times.  It was so cold it snowed and I could not hold the pen to note down the times.  I even failed to pause the stopwatch on one lap as I was so numb.  Thankfully our driver was useless in the dry and worse in the wet.  In the snow he was a liability, so much so he took the leader off at the last corner on the last lap.  My failure to record lap times was not the main talking point on the way home.  Actually there was not any talking on the way home, just a very, cold silence.

Nowadays it takes me almost as long to get ready for the race as the teams themselves.  First, I watch the race on the plasma screen.  Really it would be hard to beat unless I was able to watch it in a cinema.  I also use my Mac Pro with it's 20 inch Apple display to show the live timing screen from the official F1 website (registration is free but required to access the timings).  This shows all the runners, their split times on the current lap, their fastest lap, the track status (e.g. yellow flags waving, safety car deployed, etc.).  You can spot a bad sector before the commentators, see that someone has pitted before the TV cameras show it or even that someone has dropped out of the race before a replay shows you what happened on the track.

The one thing I was always wanted but could never get was the graphic of the track which showed the relative positions of the cars as they moved round the lap, which the teams in the pit lane had and was one of the tools to see the gaps on track that could be useful to drop their car into after a pit stop.  Well last year there was an iPhone app that gave me that as well as the live timings and a few other things.  So I now also put my iPhone on it's stand and load up the app.  It is best to turn the phone into landscape format and have the track graphic displayed on the full screen.  Just wonderful.

F1 is one sport that you can enjoy best from the comfort of your own seat but if you do go to watch a race live and I strongly recommend that you do, as you with be blown away by the noise and the speed of the cars, you can now hire an handset to give you the timing information and various other useful bits and pieces.  F1 really is a sport that not only loves technology but has it as an integral part of its make-up and it is great that there are ways that a geek can use a few gadgets to enhance that pleasure.

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