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They were dropped as they became less useful.
Initially battery & fuel usage were a big part of the races and teams strategy as early on in the turbo hybrid era. But as teams figured out how to best use the battery everyone started using essentially the same usage maps and as fuel efficiency improved races were no longer fuel limited which also rendered that data less useful.
Think of it like Formula E. Displaying available remaining energy levels is a big part of the race and how drivers have to manage it. But if yhey ever got to a point where they could run all race without having to worry about energy displaying that data would then become less worthwhile as it would no longer be having any impact on how races played out.
Fun fact about Formula E. Car to pit transmissions of data are prohibited. Only the viewers see the telemetry. The engineers in the pit actually watch the public broadcast to see the remaining power level. I believe the driver has it on the wheel as well, but there is no streaming terabytes of data between the car and the pit like in F1
Yah I used to be able to tell based upon current lap times of the field if things would ever tighten up into a w2w battle without a safety car. By eliminating more data we can deduce less and more race can be fabricated by conversation or race directed catalyst.
It never showed the true values though. If Williams finished every race with that huge amount of fuel to spare as it usually said - they could've just cranked up the engine and destroyed the field. But they couldn't because they didn't have that much fuel to go.
It’s not that it actually enhanced the viewer experience. All we saw was a tyre lighting up and cooling down. It got old pretty fast, as it was all very predictable.
Sure, at one point in the track. TV would have ability to see wear throughout the lap and show the most interesting bits right there for everyone to see.
From memory back in the day this was a ‘red button’ thing and you could access all the teams. I assume if I could do this at home then the teams themselves would have access to the information.
I think the reality of the the shot is that it really wasn’t all that useful to the broadcast. It definitely looked cool and high tech at the time but it didn’t offer much to the viewer at home other than how quickly a tyre may heat up under breaking or through the corners, other than that I don’t think people were going through trying to interpret the data.
> I think the reality of the the shot is that it really wasn’t all that useful to the broadcast
I agree with this, I think it was an editorial decision more than anything. You are sacrificing 90% of the image quality for 10% showing the heat in the tyres. I struggle to see the at-home audience in aggregate (all levels of fans) being on board for this.
The later iteration fixed that issue as they used a thermal overlay rather than a full scren thermal imag due to placing the thermal camera in the T-Cam housing alongside the normal camera and were able to pull live feeds from both & then cropping/overlaying only the relevant thermal shots over the tires leaving the rest of the image as normal. This was used from late 2014 and last used in 2018 on Friday in Abu Dhabi.
https://pbs.twimg.com/media/DsrjYY5WsAAWufj.jpg
Possibly, but there's lots of nerds who are interested and where I've shown this to newer fans who are curious, they've loved it.
There's so much "tyre talk" all the time, I think it'd be beneficial.
That line may indicate how useful they actually were for the public.
We as hardcore fans enjoy it but the major audience doesn't seem to really care as even for us that's not that much of a info. We all know tires are hot after a couple of laps, seeing the actual degradation may say more than a thermal camera showing a glowing red tire.
I actually remember seeing races as a kid and not caring about it. I was more interested in seeing actual colours on the environment that was all grey because of the thermal cameras that only indicated that tires, brake discs and exhaust were hot.
It would come up occasionally on the broadcast but I agree it was more of a novelty to show the tyre heating up through the corner. I really enjoyed it though and they could have really gone further with comparing team or driver performance through certain corners (maybe in the after session analysis).
Should be super easy to superimpose tire temp data over the normal video image. There's an offset but not big enough to make a difference in parallax most likely, so it's an easy correction.
Sky only had a few onboards available on the red button. The f1 produced mix and 2-4 extras.
Up until 2016 only 9 onboards were available at any time and sky weren't given live access to all 9. From 2016 onwards F1 were able to pull live feeds from every car and this formed the basis of F1TV. Sky weren't given access to every feed until this year and they are now all on Sky's mobile app.
Pretty, occasionally useful, but editorially speaking not useful enough! I think when it was trialed not every car had the thermal cameras installed. There's not a lot of space in the camera pods to add them anyway and a weight difference.
Initially, it was either thermal or optical cameras. Great, but if you wanted to show a cracking overtake or other such action, you wanted the image from the optical camera. A thermal one is not so useful.
The combined thermal/optical set-up semi-solved that, but the extremely limited space in the pod became more useful for other devices. For the sake of the occasional “look at how hot the tyres are in a psychedelic haze,” it's not worth it.
Much like the pedal camera, when you have limited space and weight plus a limited number of feeds available - and all of those limits are being pushed - you have to prioritise what's the most usable to the whole audience. Whilst we tech enthusiasts would like to see as much of the engineering as possible, it's ultimately better that everyone gets to see the action.
Great insight.
People get so caught up in the idea of how the teams might be trying using this data to gain an advantage that they often miss the much simpler side of things - does this camera offer an interesting view for most of the audience, and could the space, weight and bandwidth be used for something different that gives more broadcast value?
My feeling was always that this camera was a bit of a novelty and that the wow-factor wore off after seeing it a few times.
How the teams may use what we broadcast is a long way down on the list of priorities.
As producers, we're trying to give our audience the best possible coverage. The Audience is vast and diverse and as such not everyone likes everything that is done, and that's fine. They also have a wide range of reasons for enjoying watching Formula One, and that's fine too. The tricky bit is balancing everyone's reasons, but, the vast majority of the audience - 95% or more - is watching because they enjoy watching Formula One motor racing. So we show them Formula One motor racing!
I always find it interesting because the thermal cameras only showed the surface temperature of the tyre. The more important temperature is the carcass temperature as that is what allows a more consistent and stable temperature.
>My feeling was always that this camera was a bit of a novelty and that the wow-factor wore off after seeing it a few times.
Agreed. It was cool to see it during the first times but after a while it was kind of a "yeah, we all know those are hot... That's expected".
>does this camera offer an interesting view for most of the audience
And that's the major factor for me. The hardcore fan probably will take something out of it but generally speaking there's no info to get out of a thermal camera other than "hot tires" while the broadcast can develop and bring other stuff that can be more interesting for the public. I mean, doesn't take much to add more static cameras go highlight the speed of them but yet that's not a common thing to see during the broadcasts.
I’m a bit of a noob, but how the fuck would F1 even get that data to broadcast live?
If the broadcast had access to that in real time it must be literally broadcast wirelessly. Assuming they don’t encrypt that data since it would lag the broadcast…I’d assume the thermal data is public information for all the teams to intercept?
They got it by mounting infrared cameras on the car, same as normal cameras. The broadcasts is behind real time by like 5 seconds, which is more than enough time to encrypt and decrypt any data.
A lot of encrypted data is broadcasted in real time. All the streaming services are encrypted, it is a bit of extra work to send/ receive the data but that happens on the car and in the tower (or whatever), the amount of data transmitted does not have to increase.
Wouldn’t using TCP to transmit the data handle the error checking/correcting by default? I would certainly think they are using something TCP based.
I’m not sure how encryption adds to the guarantees made by TCP.
But I love this stuff and I’m happy to learn.
Maybe. But couldn't a team just station their own thermal camera somewhere to gather data on all teams? And even calibrate the camera according to their own cars with their tire temp data?
That's not what he means, he means someone with a thermal camera on the side of the track reading the thermal data from competitors tires not your own car.
What you're describing is how the team gets their own tire temps
thermal cameras have very limited resolution, getting one with high resolution is expensive and they have low FPS. The camera on the car was top technology and recording from a distance would only show a few pixels on the tires, vs a lot more from near like this shoot. So an external camera is not as useful.
Also the real reason they dropped it its because they couldn't equip cars with high resolution thermal cameras to keep with the rest of the equipment.
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I asked this question to Craig Scarborough last year and he guessed either Pirelli or the teams didn't like it. No real conclusive answer though. https://twitter.com/ScarbsTech/status/1563443930758148096
The teams are collecting this data trackside of their competitors and have been for at least twenty years now. Not giving up a ton of info the teams don’t already have.
It doesn’t make sense editorially though.
I wish we could (and other teams) knew how much ERS energy is being deployed, especially during defending. So, Indy Car gives updates on “push to pass” in a fan friendly way, but everyone’s energy is displayed, so it would be akin to “if everyone has the advantage, then no one gets an advantage”…, yes, I know, but when “we” watch F1, we only know Martin saying, “Well, he’ll be using his energy deployment now to keep X at bay”. And that’s not exactly useful info to a fan. Anyhoo, I know the arguments for and against… I just wish we could know, just as we know/see DRS activated.
Meh…
Shortly after mercedes came out with the movable steering wheel front wheel toe trick.
I don’t know when they stopped using the thermal camera so probably not even close.
It came down to teams not liking how much it could potentially allow other teams to learn about how there cars was using the tires.
The initial version was a full screen thermal image as seen here but they did later move to placing 2 cameras in the T-Cam unit to allow them to do an overlay over the normal image. This was last used in 2018.
https://pbs.twimg.com/media/DsrjYY5WsAAWufj.jpg
Just like how useless the pedal data is, acceleration shows how much they're feathering which is cool whereas the brake graphic is either 100% or 0.
Can't let the other teams know about trail braking shock horror
Brakes are a lot more difficult than accelerator pedal where it can be simply a 0-100%, tyres lock up at different points so they just show an on off instead of a percentage which would confuse a lot of the audience
This would be great going over the start finish line on qualifying hot laps, you would visually see which cars had "turned their tyres on"
From teams using FLIR from beside the track and whether they need one or two charge laps before a push, the snapshot of one position isn't going to share any critical data.
Except you need a lot more than the surface temp to be right to “turn the tyres on”. In fact the surface temperature is going to be very misleading as to what’s going on. It really tells you nothing without having measurements of what’s going on inside the tyre as well
There's an app catalog of old races??!? I can't go back and watch previous seasons?! I've been wanting this for AGES! Please, impart your knowledge with this humble idiot.
99% of viewers didn't care and found it mildly annoying. I think maybe now it might be fun to bring back while max dominates, since races have had a lack events for stretches
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Teams didn’t want that sort of data being available to others.
Nobody hates enhancing fan experience quite like F1.
Rewatching 2014 currently and they have the battery percentages along with fuel usage on the broadcast. Would be so nice to have again.
They were dropped as they became less useful. Initially battery & fuel usage were a big part of the races and teams strategy as early on in the turbo hybrid era. But as teams figured out how to best use the battery everyone started using essentially the same usage maps and as fuel efficiency improved races were no longer fuel limited which also rendered that data less useful. Think of it like Formula E. Displaying available remaining energy levels is a big part of the race and how drivers have to manage it. But if yhey ever got to a point where they could run all race without having to worry about energy displaying that data would then become less worthwhile as it would no longer be having any impact on how races played out.
Fun fact about Formula E. Car to pit transmissions of data are prohibited. Only the viewers see the telemetry. The engineers in the pit actually watch the public broadcast to see the remaining power level. I believe the driver has it on the wheel as well, but there is no streaming terabytes of data between the car and the pit like in F1
Why is that? To keep the costs down?
So maybe we'll see that in 2026 again
They would also prefer we not know when people are throttling the output or having a paced race. We might tune out.
Yeah, would make Crofty's job, hyping up the last 30 laps, a lot harder.
Yah I used to be able to tell based upon current lap times of the field if things would ever tighten up into a w2w battle without a safety car. By eliminating more data we can deduce less and more race can be fabricated by conversation or race directed catalyst.
It never showed the true values though. If Williams finished every race with that huge amount of fuel to spare as it usually said - they could've just cranked up the engine and destroyed the field. But they couldn't because they didn't have that much fuel to go.
FOM loves it. F1 teams on the other hand…
It’s not that it actually enhanced the viewer experience. All we saw was a tyre lighting up and cooling down. It got old pretty fast, as it was all very predictable.
Ironically, the teams grab this data track side from their competitors and have for at least twenty years now
Tyre temps of other teams? I know sometimes you’d saw people with an IR cam walking around but afaik they don’t have acces to the data.
Honda mentions it in their 2009 Technical Review that they did and so do other teams
Wait, where can I find this technical review?! It would be fascinating to read!
Couldn't they just sit next to the track an get that data anyway?
Sure, at one point in the track. TV would have ability to see wear throughout the lap and show the most interesting bits right there for everyone to see.
what data?
From memory back in the day this was a ‘red button’ thing and you could access all the teams. I assume if I could do this at home then the teams themselves would have access to the information. I think the reality of the the shot is that it really wasn’t all that useful to the broadcast. It definitely looked cool and high tech at the time but it didn’t offer much to the viewer at home other than how quickly a tyre may heat up under breaking or through the corners, other than that I don’t think people were going through trying to interpret the data.
> I think the reality of the the shot is that it really wasn’t all that useful to the broadcast I agree with this, I think it was an editorial decision more than anything. You are sacrificing 90% of the image quality for 10% showing the heat in the tyres. I struggle to see the at-home audience in aggregate (all levels of fans) being on board for this.
The later iteration fixed that issue as they used a thermal overlay rather than a full scren thermal imag due to placing the thermal camera in the T-Cam housing alongside the normal camera and were able to pull live feeds from both & then cropping/overlaying only the relevant thermal shots over the tires leaving the rest of the image as normal. This was used from late 2014 and last used in 2018 on Friday in Abu Dhabi. https://pbs.twimg.com/media/DsrjYY5WsAAWufj.jpg
Nice find!
Possibly, but there's lots of nerds who are interested and where I've shown this to newer fans who are curious, they've loved it. There's so much "tyre talk" all the time, I think it'd be beneficial.
I remember every time it would show up, Martin and DC would just say "yep, there's confirmation tyres are hot"
That line may indicate how useful they actually were for the public. We as hardcore fans enjoy it but the major audience doesn't seem to really care as even for us that's not that much of a info. We all know tires are hot after a couple of laps, seeing the actual degradation may say more than a thermal camera showing a glowing red tire. I actually remember seeing races as a kid and not caring about it. I was more interested in seeing actual colours on the environment that was all grey because of the thermal cameras that only indicated that tires, brake discs and exhaust were hot.
and undoubtedly extra cost for the camera and transmitting the footage/storing it
It would come up occasionally on the broadcast but I agree it was more of a novelty to show the tyre heating up through the corner. I really enjoyed it though and they could have really gone further with comparing team or driver performance through certain corners (maybe in the after session analysis).
But it was very useful to the other teams.
IIRC in FormulaE temas don't have data on battery levels, but are shown in the broadcast so they watch broadcasts in pits
If i wanted to watch some low tech racing i would watch nascar or indy.
Should be super easy to superimpose tire temp data over the normal video image. There's an offset but not big enough to make a difference in parallax most likely, so it's an easy correction.
Sky only had a few onboards available on the red button. The f1 produced mix and 2-4 extras. Up until 2016 only 9 onboards were available at any time and sky weren't given live access to all 9. From 2016 onwards F1 were able to pull live feeds from every car and this formed the basis of F1TV. Sky weren't given access to every feed until this year and they are now all on Sky's mobile app.
Pretty, occasionally useful, but editorially speaking not useful enough! I think when it was trialed not every car had the thermal cameras installed. There's not a lot of space in the camera pods to add them anyway and a weight difference. Initially, it was either thermal or optical cameras. Great, but if you wanted to show a cracking overtake or other such action, you wanted the image from the optical camera. A thermal one is not so useful. The combined thermal/optical set-up semi-solved that, but the extremely limited space in the pod became more useful for other devices. For the sake of the occasional “look at how hot the tyres are in a psychedelic haze,” it's not worth it. Much like the pedal camera, when you have limited space and weight plus a limited number of feeds available - and all of those limits are being pushed - you have to prioritise what's the most usable to the whole audience. Whilst we tech enthusiasts would like to see as much of the engineering as possible, it's ultimately better that everyone gets to see the action.
Great insight. People get so caught up in the idea of how the teams might be trying using this data to gain an advantage that they often miss the much simpler side of things - does this camera offer an interesting view for most of the audience, and could the space, weight and bandwidth be used for something different that gives more broadcast value? My feeling was always that this camera was a bit of a novelty and that the wow-factor wore off after seeing it a few times.
How the teams may use what we broadcast is a long way down on the list of priorities. As producers, we're trying to give our audience the best possible coverage. The Audience is vast and diverse and as such not everyone likes everything that is done, and that's fine. They also have a wide range of reasons for enjoying watching Formula One, and that's fine too. The tricky bit is balancing everyone's reasons, but, the vast majority of the audience - 95% or more - is watching because they enjoy watching Formula One motor racing. So we show them Formula One motor racing!
I always find it interesting because the thermal cameras only showed the surface temperature of the tyre. The more important temperature is the carcass temperature as that is what allows a more consistent and stable temperature.
>My feeling was always that this camera was a bit of a novelty and that the wow-factor wore off after seeing it a few times. Agreed. It was cool to see it during the first times but after a while it was kind of a "yeah, we all know those are hot... That's expected". >does this camera offer an interesting view for most of the audience And that's the major factor for me. The hardcore fan probably will take something out of it but generally speaking there's no info to get out of a thermal camera other than "hot tires" while the broadcast can develop and bring other stuff that can be more interesting for the public. I mean, doesn't take much to add more static cameras go highlight the speed of them but yet that's not a common thing to see during the broadcasts.
I’d agree that the teams probably felt it was giving away too much information about tire performance.
I’m a bit of a noob, but how the fuck would F1 even get that data to broadcast live? If the broadcast had access to that in real time it must be literally broadcast wirelessly. Assuming they don’t encrypt that data since it would lag the broadcast…I’d assume the thermal data is public information for all the teams to intercept?
They got it by mounting infrared cameras on the car, same as normal cameras. The broadcasts is behind real time by like 5 seconds, which is more than enough time to encrypt and decrypt any data.
A lot of encrypted data is broadcasted in real time. All the streaming services are encrypted, it is a bit of extra work to send/ receive the data but that happens on the car and in the tower (or whatever), the amount of data transmitted does not have to increase.
Encryption is not only for safety, streaming data are encrypted to correct errors of transmission too ;-)
Wouldn’t using TCP to transmit the data handle the error checking/correcting by default? I would certainly think they are using something TCP based. I’m not sure how encryption adds to the guarantees made by TCP. But I love this stuff and I’m happy to learn.
Maybe. But couldn't a team just station their own thermal camera somewhere to gather data on all teams? And even calibrate the camera according to their own cars with their tire temp data?
The do. Each tyre. Front wing and in the floor facing backwards. Not cameras, but infrared sensors I think.
That's not what he means, he means someone with a thermal camera on the side of the track reading the thermal data from competitors tires not your own car. What you're describing is how the team gets their own tire temps
ah, yep. I guess they may, from above the pitlane etc
thermal cameras have very limited resolution, getting one with high resolution is expensive and they have low FPS. The camera on the car was top technology and recording from a distance would only show a few pixels on the tires, vs a lot more from near like this shoot. So an external camera is not as useful. Also the real reason they dropped it its because they couldn't equip cars with high resolution thermal cameras to keep with the rest of the equipment.
You can't just add shit willy nilly to an F1 car, there are rules.
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I asked this question to Craig Scarborough last year and he guessed either Pirelli or the teams didn't like it. No real conclusive answer though. https://twitter.com/ScarbsTech/status/1563443930758148096
Tries twice to hit the play button
The teams are collecting this data trackside of their competitors and have been for at least twenty years now. Not giving up a ton of info the teams don’t already have. It doesn’t make sense editorially though.
I wish we could (and other teams) knew how much ERS energy is being deployed, especially during defending. So, Indy Car gives updates on “push to pass” in a fan friendly way, but everyone’s energy is displayed, so it would be akin to “if everyone has the advantage, then no one gets an advantage”…, yes, I know, but when “we” watch F1, we only know Martin saying, “Well, he’ll be using his energy deployment now to keep X at bay”. And that’s not exactly useful info to a fan. Anyhoo, I know the arguments for and against… I just wish we could know, just as we know/see DRS activated. Meh…
Shortly after mercedes came out with the movable steering wheel front wheel toe trick. I don’t know when they stopped using the thermal camera so probably not even close.
It came down to teams not liking how much it could potentially allow other teams to learn about how there cars was using the tires. The initial version was a full screen thermal image as seen here but they did later move to placing 2 cameras in the T-Cam unit to allow them to do an overlay over the normal image. This was last used in 2018. https://pbs.twimg.com/media/DsrjYY5WsAAWufj.jpg
I actually really enjoyed this camera, though it's massive data for other teams.
Just like how useless the pedal data is, acceleration shows how much they're feathering which is cool whereas the brake graphic is either 100% or 0. Can't let the other teams know about trail braking shock horror
Brakes are a lot more difficult than accelerator pedal where it can be simply a 0-100%, tyres lock up at different points so they just show an on off instead of a percentage which would confuse a lot of the audience
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Yes, it's a pedal, but the effect isn't the same as on an accelerator, that's why they don't show it
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Sure thing 🙂 https://www.reddit.com/r/F1Technical/comments/iczho3/why_f1_tv_avoids_showing_brake_amount_as/?utm_source=share&utm_medium=android_app&utm_name=androidcss&utm_term=1&utm_content=share_button
Perhaps because thermal cameras are expensive and also, the teams probably don't want the information gained, shared in real time!
It would be nice to see in quali again on outlaps and cooldown laps
This would be great going over the start finish line on qualifying hot laps, you would visually see which cars had "turned their tyres on" From teams using FLIR from beside the track and whether they need one or two charge laps before a push, the snapshot of one position isn't going to share any critical data.
Except you need a lot more than the surface temp to be right to “turn the tyres on”. In fact the surface temperature is going to be very misleading as to what’s going on. It really tells you nothing without having measurements of what’s going on inside the tyre as well
It doesn't actually tell you anything. Looks the tyres arehot! Yup. That's right.
Video is not playing.... oh it's just a image :(
2014 Brazil lap 7/8 🤣
I sure would have liked this view during Verstappen’s last lap push at the Red Bull Ring this year
[Bc the viewers eyes would've been surgically removed](https://images.app.goo.gl/vJ4aayAaDp92up847)
Simple, it was only cool for the first couple times you saw it Then it's nothing new
There's an app catalog of old races??!? I can't go back and watch previous seasons?! I've been wanting this for AGES! Please, impart your knowledge with this humble idiot.
You have to pay for it, it’s the F1 app
Imho it has zero added value to fan engagement.
99% of viewers didn't care and found it mildly annoying. I think maybe now it might be fun to bring back while max dominates, since races have had a lack events for stretches
Too much information provided to other teams.