An interesting new gadget will be tested out by the BBC for this weekends British GP. I’ve seen similar on the iPhone App last year but over the 3G signal it tended to jump around a bit. Hopefully this solution from the BBC will be more accurate although it’s still based on the live timing rather than GPS from the sounds of things. This means it makes an assumption based on a generic sector time to predict where the car is on track. For example it will clock the end of the sector and then move the car around the track at a steady pace with the theory it should reach the next sector at roughly the same time as that one gets clocked and the cycle continues. In other words it won’t tell you if a car goes off track or if a driver gets held up in traffic until the end of the sector and is therefore not much more of an advantage than normal live timing.

Hopefully this version can be more accurate as although it gives no advantage over live timing, it would give a nice visual representation. Of course I will need more screen space – I already have 3 monitors so things are now getting silly!

James Allen explains it all on his website here…

http://www.jamesallenonf1.com/2010/07/bbc-to-introduce-driver-tracker-to-live-online-f1-coverage/

The new gadget will tell you where on the track each car is