Six new television graphics coming to F1 broadcasts in 2020

2020 F1 season

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The first of six new television graphics will appear during next week’s Austrian Grand Prix, which will open the 2020 F1 season.

The graphics have been developed with F1 sponsor Amazon Web Services and will incorporate their branding.

The ‘Car Performance Scores’ will be the first new graphic to debut next week. According to F1 the information it presents will be based on a million data points per second being transmitted by the cars.

Later rounds will see the introduction of other new graphics. At the 70th Anniversary Grand Prix, the fifth round of the championship, an ‘Ultimate Driver Speed Comparison’ will contrast the performance of current drivers against past racers dating back as far as 1983.

The ‘High-speed/Low-speed Corner Performance’ graphic will be introduced at the Belgian Grand Prix, giving information on drivers’ cornering performance.

Other graphics slated for introduction in the second half of the 2020 season include ‘Driver Skills Rating’, ‘Car/Team Development and Overall Season Performance’ and ‘Qualifying and Race Pace Predictions’.

Formula 1 chief engineer Rob Smedley said F1’s partnerhsip with AWS is “bringing fans closer to the track than ever before, and unlocking previously untold stories and insights from behind the pit wall.”

New F1 television graphics
New F1 television graphics

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Keith Collantine
Lifelong motor sport fan Keith set up RaceFans in 2005 - when it was originally called F1 Fanatic. Having previously worked as a motoring...

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67 comments on “Six new television graphics coming to F1 broadcasts in 2020”

  1. Oh come on AWS, 2020 has already been bad enough…

    1. @minnis I checked the date of the article as I was reading just to make sure it wasn’t 1st of April. I’m not just saying that, I actually checked.

      1. Agreed. Look at Gasly, says he’s fastest on that graphic. Clearly an April fools joke

  2. Weeel, let’s see whether those graphs will make more sense than the tyre wear graphic that never even bothered to consult with Pirelli and was completely nonsense.

    Call me a sceptic.

    Also, when we are talking about F1 wanting to be inclusive, respectful to health care etc, etc, I am not at all sure it is a good time to highlight cooperation with Amazon’s AWS. Did Bezos finally stop penalizing his workers for calling in sick?

    1. Also, most of those graphics sound like they don’t really add much that people actually want.

      Maybe the only one that sounds that interesting is the low and high speed corner performance, as that makes for an interesting discussion on how a driver and team might be gaining or losing time – most of the rest sounds like excessive clutter.

      1. That one did make me wonder anon at least at the back of the grid they can do the same graphics, but just ending with the slowest in the field, and counting up. I mean, if you don’t know the field well yet, it might be interesting to see the differences (if they are meaningful, which I too am sceptical of) and speculate whether a car will be able to try a move, and where. When DRS doesn’t decide.

      2. It seems that FOM/AWS want to make it too complex, anon, by ‘scoring’ everything.
        Additional graphics can be extremely helpful but they should be simple. Golf adds the distance to the flag and even wind strengths and direction, but they don’t give a (millions of data points) value of the difficulty of a shot. Sailing tracks the boats via GPS and shows who is ahead, but they don’t ruin that graphic by calculating where there is more wind, and which skipper is likely to finish first.
        Just show some quantitative data and that’s all we need (indeed the cornering speed/time could be interesting).

        PS: why call something ‘Car Performance Score’ and then rate/grade drivers instead of cars?

        1. @coldfly I’d love to see F1 graphics stripped back to the basics. Lap count and position ladder on the left, fastest laps appearing as appropriate, the occasional popup showing how long a driver was in the pits, yellow flag and safety car graphics, and that’s about it. Limit what team radio is broadcast too.

          Give the commentators some limited extra information, such as live lap times, so they can use them as they see fit.

          Make all the tyres indistinguishable (the teams will have them organised) so we don’t know who is running what, as it used to be in the past.

          This alone would make it so much less predictable

          1. Tommy Scragend
            24th June 2020, 9:26

            Exactly this. Part of the enjoyment of watching races in the past was, to be honest, that no one really knew what was going on. We had Murray coming up with his ideas but you basically had to keep watching till the end.

            These days everything is simulated to within an inch of its life, and the graphics on screen tell you so much that you almost don’t even need to bother watching the moving images. It’s all too predictable and, dare I say it, boring.

      3. F1oSaurus (@)
        23rd June 2020, 17:36

        How would they know it’s down to the driver and not simply a difference in setup?

        1. @f1osaurus I was thinking of it more in terms of a qualitative comparison to illustrate potential traits.

          For example, it might suggest that a particular car might be particularly strong under braking in a certain sector of the track, or it might illustrate that a particular driver might have a set up that is slightly higher downforce if they are consistently quicker through the corners of a particular circuit, but then consistently slower on the straights.

          It’s not necessarily giving absolute data, but over an extended period of time, it might illustrate certain trends that are inherent to a particular car, or it might also indicate certain driving characteristics through that aggregated data.

  3. We’re more interested in the graphics leaving F1, tires degradation in particular…

    Anyway, let’s see it before judging. I have the feeling that the first one it’s just a translation of latest lap times in a better format (10/10 the pole lap and proportionally from there) and if that’s true it’s ok, I reckon not everyone watching F1 is a nerd.

  4. I don’t have a problem with F1 providing us with more factual information, such as the first graphic showing the different time deltas and speeds that drivers are taking into a corner or the high/low speed comparisons. However, I just don’t understand the point of the graphics such as to determine the best F1 driver in history? How can you compare Hamilton to Prost for instance? I think F1 should focus on providing us with better information relating to what is actually happening on track, and not predictions/assumptions.

    1. Indeed @mashiat.
      “Hamilton must be better, cos the graphic said so”.
      I’ll be sceptical until I see evidence that these graphics add something to the broadcast experience.

    2. @mashiat not to mention that it seems very hard to believe that you could undertake any sort of meaningful comparison over a period of 37 years when so much has changed out of all recognition.

      Take, for example, Silverstone, which is the circuit this feature is apparently being introduced at. If you look at the layout of Silverstone in 1983, virtually every single corner is different – most of the original circuit was dug up in the 1990s – so how you are meant to compare the performance of a driver around Silverstone in 1983 in a vastly different car and at a circuit that is unrecognisable to the modern one doesn’t really make any sense.

      I agree that factual information is useful, such as maybe illustrating how one driver is catching another (incidentally, what happened to the old graphic of showing time differences over three consecutive laps?). This, though, feels like adding graphics for the sake of adding them – or, rather, adding them simply to make Amazon’s name appear more frequently on the screen.

  5. Adam (@rocketpanda)
    23rd June 2020, 13:12

    It’s a bit bad when you need to explain the graphic that’s meant to help explain.

    Needless and irrelevant to be honest. What are these numbers for? By what metric are they made? Did anyone truly ask for MORE graphics? Like more information is useful but this is just confusing and unclear.

    Driver skills rating is just an absolute mess to unpack here. That kind of thing is going to cause a lot of arguments and antagonism and personally for the drivers could cost them jobs. It’s a very, very poor idea. Same with the ‘ultimate driver comparison’. Maybe it’ll be interesting statistically, but in a race it’s irrelevant data.

    1. Did anyone truly ask for MORE graphics?

      more *relevant* graphics, yes.

  6. Lenny (@leonardodicappucino)
    23rd June 2020, 13:13

    If they leave the horrendous ratings out of 10 out of it, seeing whether drivers are losing time in acceleration zones/straights/medium speed corners would actually be interesting. Some of these others sound like they could be interesting, but more for the build up (Development and Pace Predictions), but some just sound awful. Comparing driver ratings with older drivers is probably going to be terrible and even if theyre good will probably ruin a lot of childhoods (mathematical models often show the drivers of the 80s and 90s to be much worse than modern drivers, with one model that is actually pretty good imo showing that Senna and Prost were worse than Perez and Hulkenberg).

    1. @leonardodicappucino A lot of people have tried various statistical methods of comparing the performance of drivers from different eras. I’ve read some of them, and they can be entertaining if you don’t take them too seriously. But any system will always be flawed because whatever calculation method you use, you always have to make a whole host of assumptions and manual adjustments, which means the outcome is determined by your choices and biases in those areas.

      Usually the comparison between teammates is a starting point, but of course that has problems too – especially going back to earlier decades when teammates didn’t necessarily have the same equipment at hand. Also, driver performance is not static across their careers – some perform better early on but fade in later years, some might peak late etc, which can also skew the figures. I remember one method came out showing that Nico Rosberg was in the top 10 of all time, primarily because of his performance against Schumacher from 2010-2012, which boosted his rating considerably since Schumacher himself was so highly rated.

      So honestly, I don’t mind if they do this as a one off feature as long as they present it in a way that shows it’s purely for the sake of entertainment. But if they try to present it as a serious statistical model then they are going to get a lot of flak from fans who get offended when their favourites inevitably don’t show as highly as they believe they should.

      1. @keithedin to be fair, the individual who looked at that acknowledged that his approach was still under development and explicitly noted that Nico Rosberg was likely rated too highly.

        To that end, they did then revise their modelling techniques to provide a better fit to age related performances that resulted in Nico being revised downwards to account for the reduction in Schumacher’s driving potential in 2010-2012 – although Nico is still rated reasonably highly on account of his performances relative to Hamilton.

  7. I can already tell I dont like this

  8. Ben Rowe (@thegianthogweed)
    23rd June 2020, 13:21

    I think they will introduce these and find out they are a huge failure. The graphics these days are just too cluttered. I think what they should do is have them as optional extras for those who want them. Some may just want to watch what is on the screen. I found the replacement leader board change in 2016 bad enough. Cars constantly drive behind it and it blocks the image. It used to be a small discrete bar at the bottom showing 5 drivers at a time. The new one has some advantage, but the size is overkill and I’m saying that when i have a 24 inch monitor that I watch everything on. I also find the way they show the drivers rather than just their names and face like they used to OTT. When a driver spins or crashes out and they show a replay, they often seem to fill the screen with the driver smugly walking up to you and folding their arms. Just what is the point of this? A small bar with their name and face is enough so they don’t block the screen…

    These things really are going to start ruining watching the action on screen even more soon.

  9. No doubt Crofty will be super excited about new graphics he can assault our ears about.

    1. Until AWS starts rating Crofty out of 10.

      1. CPS (Crofty Performance Score): 0.001%

        Oh… that’s how much I’ve missed Crofty. Adjusted for inflation.

  10. “Car performance score”, or lap time as most people call it.

  11. It would be interesting perhaps, to be able to compare the lateral G force in corners and the longitudinal in acceleration and braking. They would need to show these figures for one driver after another covering the same length of track or corner. Split screen would be good where ther is close competition.

  12. Urgh. I suppose it’s nice for some people but I hate the Americanisation of all this. Americans seem to love their endless stats on everything in sports like Baseball and American Football. I feel like Liberty are trying to foster that here. And sure the data is there for it, but are a lot of these things what the fans truly care about? I honestly don’t think so. I don’t think any of these metrics will ever be in wide use amongst anybody besides some weird subset of uber nerds.

    We all just want good fun close racing and seeing who ultimately comes out on top, I don’t care who has better traction for the 8th percentile of a corner approach or whatever BS lol.

    1. GtisBetter (@)
      23rd June 2020, 16:04

      It’s not Americanization, but sponsorship. They need to show X amount of graphics per race and just make some up. Not doubt they have real numbers to back them up, but last year most graphics were pointless. Let’s see how this year turns out.

  13. Redundant.

  14. Remember when time gaps and commentary was all you needed to understand a Grand Prix?

    1. Absolutely agree. Who needs rankings and ratings when the best (and most important) ranking is the timesheet!

  15. I don’t like any of these AWS graphics. It’s just more clutter on an already cluttered screen that is producing information that isn’t really needed & doesn’t really tell you anything you can’t already see and/or don’t already know.

    The 2018 graphics are bad enough to begin with & everything else they have layered on top of them over the past year has just made them worse.

    1. You go back & look at the 2017 graphics & they take up less space, Look less cluttered, Are easier to read & give you all the information you need.
      https://imgur.com/a/IjbYi5Q

      They also featured a bit more information than what we have had since 2018 with things like ERS usage & a live G-force meter, Information that was displayed without looking like clutter.

      I think a lot of these AWS analysis graphics should be used for post session/race analysis features that are made available on F1TV, Social media & to broadcasters. They make more sense been used in that way rather than been plastered all over the live world-feed while your trying to watch an actual live session/race.

  16. AWS is useless, their data is useless and just doesn’t habe anything real. Fake company, fake data

  17. This makes absolutely no sense.

    Why use scores when we already have valid measurement units like kph (mph), seconds or meters?

    It’d be better to pick a corner and show minimum speed at apex, or exit or whatever.

    1. it just feels so arbitrary to use “scores”, or “ratings”… there are better ways to show performance gains

      1. Tommy Scragend
        24th June 2020, 9:28

        And at the end of the day, driver performance scores don’t matter a jot. The finishing order on the track is all that matters.

  18. I like stats, but I don’t like this. It’s bad enough having too many graphics distracting the action, but having (assumed) opinion-based ratings disguised as factual information just seems wrong.

  19. All utterly pointless if the series actually had close competitive racing.

    Besides Amazon has done enough damage to our day to day lives as it is!

  20. So much abject negativity here today from so many. I look forward to giving these new titbits of information a chance to see if they do add anything to the experience. They may or may not – they may give us some valid talking points – who knows yet?

    1. If only it were accurate.

  21. I for one cannot wait to see LASTNAME’s Driver Skills Rating.

    1. On a slightly more serious note, I don’t bemoan them seeking new ways to tell the story of the race. After all, F1 is a sport for people counting milliseconds and it is such a data-rich sport. But why not shift this data to the F1 app? Make it a selling point by giving people the option choose to toggle it on or off as and when they want it; it would give people the chance to set up the tablet like they are on the pitwall themselves, analysing data along with the teams. The broadcast screen real estate should be kept clear as possible for watching the on-track action, then use second screens to help enhance the experience.

  22. Can’t imagine what new information this will give us that we won’t be able to learn from, you know, actually watching the race. I can only think of this as a marketing tool to promote AWS‘ technology and products, whatever they are. This just looks like showing off for the sake of showing off.

  23. Less is more.

  24. Here’s an idea, make them optional for the end-user.

  25. Yeah i’m not a fan of these just as i’m not some of the other AWS predictive stuff we had last year.

    The screen is simply too cluttered now & I don’t think the size of the current graphics helps with that. Not to mention that some of this information is pointless and/or irrelevant.

    Why do we need to see something such as that Hamilton is rated 9.5 over a lap while Bottas is 9.2 when we could just look at the actual laptime & see that Lewis is x tenths faster.

    1. they want to be able to predict the whole race, hit a button and watch it play out exactly like the prediction. you know, great for sports and entertainment!

  26. I like the idea of seeing how much speed each car is gaining or losing in a corner. Rating the performance out of 10 is a dumb idea though. That’s really the job of the commentators to do.

    1. I’d argue it’s the job of the fans to score the drivers! Relative speed in corners sounds like a good stat to know though. Or can they tell us exactly where each driver is braking going in and at what point they very back on the throttle? Then let us decide if that’s better or worse! This score out of ten nonsense is subjective and doesn’t take into account any other variables. For example: say Bottas was conserving his tyres for a one stop but Hamilton was going hammer time for a two stopper. Who has done the best job on each particular lap? Impossible to ‘score’ it in that instance and many others (driving a broken car, passing back markers or even just attempting an overtake), overheating brakes, starts raining, avoiding debris and so on and so on

  27. And no bottom screen graphic.

  28. Great. New designs and layouts for AWS ads.

  29. They need to focus on data accuracy first and foremost. Their tyre wear and pit stop predictions have been woeful to date.

  30. Just watched the explanatory video on AWS YouTube channel. Oh dear. I wonder what the understeer/oversteer AI will think of something like Alonso’s driving style in the 2005-ish Renault.

    If such graphics must exist, I’d improve them by having some kind of instantly recognisable ranking system. For example, simply “bad-average-good” ranking for speed in low/medium/high speed corners would be much clearer than “5.9/10”. Or just have a speed trap in some corners and show the ranking per driver/team.

  31. They’re adverts for Amazon.

    Think of them the same way you think of those ones that pop up at the bottom of US races and you can ignore them.

  32. Maybe it’s cool and adds to the event so
    give it a chance. It might be better than all of you already know.

  33. Montréalais (@)
    23rd June 2020, 21:30

    I hate the idea of adding more clutter overlaid on the available screen space when what I really want to see is the cars and drivers. If I want analysis I listen to the analysts during the race or I visit this web site. I definitely do not want Amazon to tell me what I should think of the race.

  34. More screen clutter. Guaranteed to appear at the bottom of the screen just when something interesting is happening, because FOM have the worse TV director available.

  35. Oh nooooo

  36. Jockey Ewing
    24th June 2020, 5:02

    These performance stats hopefully will be more expressive than the similarly named ones from the Live timing of formula1.com, because those are not really useful. Although pouring too much data is not really necessary to develop understanding, or there are many fields where even a lot of data can’t help the average guy. So I’m skeptic about displaying these.
    I won’t mind displaying some kind of really useful or amazing stats, something hud like or idk, but if they really want to do something cool, that hud could be configurable, the viewer could choose how many of those stats he or se wants to see, and could adjust the size of the graphics.
    Live timing is more useful than those additional stats, but sometimes the broadcast lags a bit behind of the live timing, and it’s a bit bad to see things happened before you see it in the broadcast.

    1. absolutely. they are claiming to stream 22 million points of data per second but cant get the telemetry and timing graphics in sync with the picture broadcast. laughable.

  37. a MILLION points of data per second x 22 cars? Are they calculating the expansion of the universe? assuming a “point of data” is a bit, then the fastest wireless networks today dont even come close to that claim.

    and the graphics have been too cluttered and now even more makes for exhausting onslaught of data. we just want to see the cars portrayed well with good camerawork, and have the basics like lap time, difference between cars with a green or red color to indicate losing or gaining time, and sector times. maybe mid corner speed would be cool. People get sold on things by inside computer scientists, or dumb surveys on their website that arent really in line with what average fans actually respond to.

    1. Jockey Ewing
      27th June 2020, 18:58

      The way how do we interpret this “million data point per second per car thing” is quite questionable.
      As there is no more info given, I’d say it’s something that they said, because it looks good in media.
      1) Data and information are synonyms for many, but not exactly the same. Information is a useful thing, that someone or a system can extract from the available data. The former is a quite popular and imo acceptable definition of information around the field of data processing.
      2) So the graphics at TV shows this information gained from data polled by many many sensors of the car and transmitted liklely via mobile broadband to a system around the track to be really processed.
      3) There are likely many many sensors like : fuel level, fuel flow, position of the car in 3D space, angle of steering wheel, speed, acceleration, engine rev, used gear, pressure of pedals, temperature and other states of various car parts, life signs of the driver, and who knows.
      4) Many of these sensors can be read or polled many times per second, at a certain, likely at quite high frequency, as we learnt from Ferrari’s fuel flow system’s scrutineering. Imo many of these sensors maybe polled more than 1000 times per seconds, I was astonished by the former still quite low frequency of fuel flow polling. (And yes that was too low…)
      5) So these values gathered at the car, but imo not transmitted at every reading, because that would be likely impossible as you correctly assume. Same applies for loading webpages small elements, connection is not built up and ended for every small chunk. The overhead of connecting, and the low proportion of valuable data (payload) per packet (an almost empty packet is quite big by itself) would kill the effort.
      6) So these small chunks of data are gathered and maybe to some extent processed at the car before packaging, in network terms, serializing or marshalling into a much larger chunk, and sent to the system around the track at a much lower frequency (but still many times per second) but much more efficiently using the network (something mobile broadband like here).
      Cutting edge mobile broadbands are likely capable of sending or recieving in the gigabytes per second range.
      A reading from a sensor is likely a floating point number, what is something like 4 or 8 bytes in efficent systems (or a boolean but size not differs too much), so 8 byte x 22 million readings is 172 megabytes / sec. Yes that’s around the gigabit / second range.
      Seems quite much, but some preprocessing can happen even at the car, and some compressing can happen at the serializing or marshalling, so this amount is likely lower (they create an effective to store or send binary chunk by that time, so why not to compress a bit?).
      Then the data processing system around the track deserializes, extracts the information, and that shows up as key points of telemetry or good or bad graphics at TV.
      Imo today they easily can send 100 megabits per second from a moving F1 car if they want, to a close location, where highest frequency microwaves can optimally operate.
      I’m not a network expert, although had to learn about things like this a bit, so I read a nice book on it from Andrew S. Tanenbaum who has astonishing knowledge at every field of it including maths, physics, IT designs, and actual coding. It’s plain crazy that he’s at high level at all of them.

  38. Well, seems like most folks are more than a bit under encouraged about the new graphic proposals.

    Believing the old adage that a picture is worth a thousand words,(a million data points?) I have always wished for the ability to show two cars racing together with their images transposed upon each other. Such a presentation would provide a wealth of information which is impossible to engender from simple numerical data. An overlay if you will.

    It would create endless comparisons and talking points. Now you have statements such as, “Bottas is losing two tenths in the final sector.” But, how is he losing that time…..not braking as late…..too early of a turn-in…..missing the best apex…accelerating too aggressively on exit and sliding the rear. A video overlay would allow comparison between any two (or more?) cars. It may seem like a trivial tool, or to some even, “gimmicky”, but if used for a period, I’m sure it would come to be as important as the “replay” is now…..at least to viewers who were interested in meaningful comparisons.

  39. RocketTankski
    25th June 2020, 19:51

    but will the new graphics be better on Xbox or PlayStation?

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