Episode 1 ended where the race finally began. At 16:05 the Safety Car led the field away, and on lap 2 race control sent the message everyone had waited an hour for: safety car will enter pits, rolling start.
This episode is the first eight laps. Nothing dramatic happens in them. Nobody at the front passes anybody. That's exactly why I picked them: if a race replay can make eight quiet laps of Monaco worth watching, it can handle anything.
What's on screen
All 20 cars, from their real positions twice a second. The timing tower is worked out live from where the cars are on track.
- Two laps behind the Safety Car, then the rolling start.
- Charles leads, Carlos is second, Pérez third, Verstappen fourth. That order holds for all eight laps.
- After lap 8, Charles is 3.0 seconds ahead of Carlos, 5.0 ahead of Pérez and 6.6 ahead of Verstappen.
- The track is drying. Charles's lap times drop from 1:43.2 on lap 3 to 1:37.4 on lap 8, almost six seconds in five laps.
- The front four all stay on full wets. Schumacher (lap 4), then Vettel and Tsunoda (lap 6), gamble on intermediates early.
The accordion
Monaco's hairpin is the slowest corner in Formula 1, about 44 km/h. I wanted you to feel that without reading a number. So every car leaves a short trail of where it was a moment ago. On the straights the trails stretch out. At the hairpin they shrink to almost nothing, and the field visibly bunches up, every single lap.
It's my favourite corner, so it also gets its own camera. Hairpin cam zooms the map right onto it, and car codes appear once you're close enough to read them.
Making eight laps watchable
- Auto speed. While the Safety Car leads, playback runs at 4× so you can follow the rolling start. From the green flag it ramps up to 16×, the lap skip, so all eight laps take under two minutes.
- The Safety Car is a guess. Its position isn't in the data, so I draw it just ahead of the leader and label it as an estimate. A labelled guess is better than pretending.
- Calm mode turns off the camera moves and the trails. The cars and the tower still update, they just don't slide.
My favourite race control message from that afternoon has nothing to do with racing: "Pink head padding material must be used." It's real, and it's in the log.
Personal concept. Not affiliated with Formula 1 or Scuderia Ferrari.