What is F1 Telemetry?
F1 telemetry is the live stream of data coming off the car itself — speed, throttle, brake, gear, engine RPM and DRS. F1 Live Data plots it free in your browser so you can see exactly how a driver is working the car through every corner.
Timing tells you who is fast; telemetry tells you why. Each Formula 1 car sends hundreds of channels back to its garage, and a handful of them describe how the driver is driving. This guide explains the main channels and how to read a telemetry trace.
Open live telemetry →The telemetry channels
- Speed (km/h)
- How fast the car is travelling. The peaks are the straights and the dips are the corners — the lowest point of each dip is the apex minimum speed.
- Throttle (%)
- How much accelerator the driver is applying, from 0 to 100%. Watch how early and how smoothly a driver gets back to full throttle out of a corner.
- Brake
- Brake application. The braking point — where the trace jumps up — is one of the biggest differences between a fast and a slow lap.
- Gear
- Which of the eight gears is selected. Gear traces reveal shift points and confirm which corners are taken in which gear.
- RPM
- Engine revolutions per minute — the engine's working range, and, read alongside gear, the exact shift timing.
- DRS
- The Drag Reduction System flap. When open on a straight it cuts drag for a higher top speed; telemetry shows precisely where a driver deploys it.
How to read a telemetry trace
A telemetry chart plots a channel against distance around the lap, so the corners line up vertically across every channel. Overlay two drivers and the story appears: where the speed lines diverge, one driver is carrying more speed; where the brake trace starts earlier, one is braking sooner; where throttle reaches 100% first, one is getting on the power earlier out of the corner. Add a lap-delta trace and you can watch the time gap between two laps grow or shrink metre by metre, while a track-dominance map colours the circuit by whoever is fastest through each mini-sector.
Telemetry, tyres and strategy
Telemetry also underpins strategy. Consistent lap times and throttle traces across a stint point to a healthy tyre; a driver braking earlier and carrying less apex speed as the laps tick by is a sign of a tyre going off. F1 Live Data pairs the car-data traces with stint and tyre-degradation views so the on-track behaviour and the strategy picture sit side by side.
See live F1 telemetry, free
F1 Live Data streams car telemetry for every session, free and with no signup. Pick one or more drivers, choose a lap or use the fastest-lap mode, and compare their speed, throttle, brake, gear, RPM and DRS traces channel by channel — live during a session or on any finished session.
Compare telemetry live →