Race Trace (Sponsor Preview)

What is Race Trace?

Race Trace is a graphical way to visualize the competitive progress of an entire Grand Prix. More technically, it's a visualization of delta over time or distance. There are a few ways to visualize Race Trace, and MultiViewer’s public preview is specifically a gap trace — where the graph plots the relative gaps between cars (time series) and the race leader (defined delta).

How does Race Trace Work?

As a car passes a mini sector timing line, MultiViewer plots the position of the car on a graph, drawing a line from mini sector to mini sector, as the driver completes each lap. You can see drivers overtake one another (the lines cross), pit (dips), close battles (the lines get so very close🤏) and you can see who is closing the gap to another driver visually. The graph gets wider and longer as the race time elapses, expanding to show the full story of the race as it unfolds.

We need you!

Please share your experience with us as you use it. It’s very helpful to us if you capture screenshots if you see anything out of the ordinary that doesn’t correct itself in the next sector. Share your feedback (you can upload images and video) here

Using Race Trace in MultiViewer

Getting access:

• You need to be on MultiViewer version v1.34.0 or higher. You can check your MultiViewer version by tapping on the 3 dots in the top right of the app and looking at the bottom of the list

  • MultiViewer automatically updates for nearly all users, but if you have selected a Windows version without updates, you will need to download a new update

• You must have an active F1TV Pro or Access subscription

• After updating your app, open the URL below on the machine with MultiViewer installed and running to enable Race Trace. You will be asked to open it with the MultiViewer app and it will apply a small configuration change to your app, exposing the entry point to Race Trace

  • Enable Race Trace

  • Disable Race Trace

How to open Race Trace:

• Race Trace only works for *live or replay race sessions* (sorry, no practice or qualifying sessions at this time)

• On the stream selection window for your chosen race, open Live Timing (or replay live timing for past races). You will see Race Trace listed in the grid of additional windows that you can open. If you do not see it, verify your app version, retry the URL above and make sure you’re watching a Race Session.

• After opening, the Race Trace window will remain "empty" until the race begins and at least one driver has set a time through the first mini sector. It will then continually update as the race progresses.

• You must leave the live timing window open for Race Trace to collect data, as is true for most other windows in MultiViewer's live timing.

Understanding Race Trace:

• Teams are identified by using the universal team colors for their identifying line. If you use custom team or driver colors in MultiViewer, these will not be respected today — though they will be in the future.

• Individual drivers on the same team are either a solid or dotted line. Which driver is which was chosen by numerical order — meaning the lowest driver number on the team is solid, the highest is dotted.

• You can hover your mouse over any point in the graph and a tooltip will appear showing the entire field’s gaps to the leader. As the race progresses, this tooltip can take a few seconds to update if you move it around the graph. Please be a little patient with it 😅

• You can filter the trace to individual (or multiple) drivers to highlight only their progress through the race. You can do this by selecting the funnel icon on the top right of the Race Trace window, selecting the drivers of your choice, and selecting Apply Changes. You can also reset your changes here.

• You can control the vertical axis of the graph by scrolling down after it has loaded and changing the "Upper Bound" number to the number of your choice.

Known Issues:

• You may see blank mini sectors or gaps in the graph. This happens for a few reasons but the most frequent are: F1 didn’t pass the data to live timing, or a driver(s) missed the timing line for a mini sector (meaning they took a little detour off the track, whoopsy).

• We do our best to handle lapped drivers but this is largely estimated and can be off by several tenths. This will improve.

• There is a particularly tricky data bug we’re aware of that will randomly cause some drivers' plotpoint to spike up — keep this in mind while using it. The driver’s line should go back to its correct position as they drive through the next mini sector.

• There is no guarantee that this Race Trace is exact. Please do not make race strategy calls off of this and blame us. 😅