F1's New Ghost Car Comparison Feature Aids Broadcaster Race Analysis

F1's new Ghost Car comparison feature aids broadcaster race analysis By George Bevir

Friday, May 16, 2025 - 10:18

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Max Verstappen and Oscar Piastri's Ghost Car Lap Comparison via the F1 YouTube channel here

When Max Verstappen took an unexpected pole position in Saudi Arabia in the fifth race of the season, he did so by edging out Oscar Piastri by just 0.010s.

Such a fine margin provided a perfect opportunity to showcase the new Ghost Car' feature that was rolled out at the start of the season, with on-board view providing a visual insight into how racing lines impact lap times - ideal to explain how Verstappen nabbed pole position from Piastri.

Primarily used during qualifying shows to aid broadcasters' analysis, Ghost Car was inspired by a 2015 offering known as Virtual GP' that set out to provide a similar perspective and comparison.

Mostly it's for qualifying shows I think that's where it tells a really good story of how small those gaps are, how tight the racing lines are, but also big and small differences between what those laps are, says Formula 1 executive director TV production Dean Locke.

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The F1 broadcast team developed an application to align GPS data with video for better accuracy. With a focus on centimetre-level precision, such accuracy can be tricky to achieve, especially on complex street circuits like Baku and Singapore. And positioning is harder horizontally than vertically due to vehicle speed and circuit environments.

Says Locke: We have relatively good positioning data, but not good enough, necessarily, just to turn that on and push out a Ghost Car lap the cars are so incredibly quick, and any small difference is magnified to such a huge degree.

We worked on an application where we can cross-reference our positioning data with video, and looked at how we could really create this in a really fast way.

The initial launch took place during the first race of the season in Australia, and amid strong interest from broadcasters efforts are now underway to reduce delivery time so it can be made available faster post-qualifying.

I think the time to delivery will be reduced dramatically so broadcast partners can get it in their post qualifying shows.

We listened and developed that product and made sure we could deliver in the best way we could. A lot of work has gone into it, but we are really happy the way it looks, and I think it tells an incredible story.

The 2025 Emilia-Romagna Grand Prix, Italy, takes place Sunday May 18

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