- Telemetry is data sent from the car to the team while it runs, from hundreds of sensors.
- Teams use it to keep the car healthy, tune the setup, coach the driver and plan the race.
- It is one-way: since 2003 a team cannot change the car's settings from the pit wall.
- Fans see a small slice — speed, throttle, brake, gear — and the F1 games broadcast the same kind of data from your own laps.
Telemetry, in plain words
The word means measuring at a distance. An F1 car carries hundreds of sensors, logs their readings as it goes and streams a live selection of them by radio to the team's garage, where engineers watch it on screens through every session. When the car comes back in, the full log is downloaded for a closer look.
Most of what an engineer looks at is a set of lines drawn against distance round the lap — speed, throttle, brake, gear — one on top of another, for one lap or for two laps compared. Here are two laps of a circuit the length of Monza, drawn from StintLab's synthetic demo laps:
What it measures
A real car records far more than any game or broadcast shows. The main groups, and how much of each the F1 25 game also sends from your own driving:
| Channel | What it tells you | In F1 25's telemetry |
|---|---|---|
| Speed | How fast the car is going, all the way round the lap. The most-read trace of all. | Yes |
| Throttle and brake | How hard each pedal is pressed. Together they show where a driver brakes, coasts and gets back on the power. | Yes |
| Steering and gear | Wheel angle and the gear selected — how much the driver is asking of the front tyres, and where the shifts fall. | Yes |
| Position and distance | Where the car is on the circuit, so every other reading can be placed at a point on the track. | Yes |
| Lap and sector times | The official timing, split into three sectors — and, on a real car, smaller mini-sectors. | Yes |
| Tyres | Temperatures, pressures and wear — how hard the tyres are working and how long they will last. | Yes |
| Fuel and energy | Fuel used and, on a hybrid car, how energy is harvested and deployed. | Yes |
| Engine and systems | Revs, temperatures, pressures and hundreds of health readings that warn a team before something fails. | Some — revs, temperatures |
| Suspension and aero | Ride heights, suspension travel and loads — how the car is sitting on the track and how the aerodynamics are working. | Some — suspension movement |
Each term is explained in a sentence or two in the telemetry glossary.
What teams do with it
- Keep the car running. Engineers watch temperatures and pressures live, and can tell the driver to back off or stop before a part fails.
- Tune the setup. Ride heights, tyre temperatures and the driver's inputs show whether a change to the car helped or hurt.
- Coach the driver. Overlaying one lap on a faster one — often a teammate's — shows exactly where the time goes: a brake point, a slower apex, a late throttle.
- Plan the race. Tyre wear and fuel use per lap feed the strategy: when to stop, what to fit, how hard to push.
What fans get to see
The teams' full data stays private. What reaches the public is the timing — every lap and sector — and a small set of car channels such as speed, throttle, brake, gear and DRS. That is what drives the speed and pedal graphics on the broadcast and the side-by-side lap comparisons after qualifying, and open-source projects such as FastF1 make the same public data available for recent seasons.
Reading those graphics is a skill of its own, and it takes about ten minutes to learn: How to read F1 telemetry goes through a corner trace by trace, and F1 sector times explained covers the purple, green and yellow on the timing screen.
Your own F1 telemetry, from the game
You do not need a team to have telemetry. F1 25 on PC can broadcast its own data while you drive — speed, throttle, brake, steering, gear, DRS, your position on track, lap and sector times, fuel and tyres — over your local network, to any program listening for it. It is the game's physics rather than a real car's sensors, but it is read and compared in exactly the same way.
- F1 25 telemetry settings — switching it on, step by step.
- F1 25 telemetry, explained — what the game sends and how laps are judged.
- Sim racing telemetry — the same idea for other games and rigs.
StintLab records every lap you drive in F1 25 and Assetto Corsa on your own Windows PC and draws it the way a team would: two laps on one distance axis, the delta between them, every braking zone, fuel and tyres.
Questions
What is F1 telemetry, in one sentence?
It is the data an F1 car records and sends back to its team while it runs — speed, throttle, brake, gear, tyres, fuel and hundreds of other readings — so engineers can see what the car and the driver are doing without being in the car.
Can an F1 team change the car from the pit wall?
No. Telemetry only flows from the car to the team. Changing a car's settings remotely has been banned since 2003, so any change during a session has to be made by the driver, usually on instruction over the radio.
Is F1 telemetry public?
The teams' full data is not. What fans can see is the timing and a small set of car channels — such as speed, throttle, brake, gear and DRS — that appear on the broadcast and that open-source tools like FastF1 make available for recent seasons.
What is the difference between timing and telemetry?
Timing says how long a lap or a sector took. Telemetry says how the car was driven through it, metre by metre — which is what tells you why one lap was faster than another.
Can I get F1 telemetry from my own driving?
Yes, from the F1 games. F1 25 on PC can broadcast its telemetry over your network while you drive, and a program such as StintLab can record every lap and read it back like a team would.