F1 Drivers in Traffic: Pace in Dirty Air

About this chart

What it shows. Whether the car in front cost a driver time. Each lap is plotted by how close the car ahead was on average and how long the lap took, so laps run in traffic can be separated from laps in clear air.

How to read it. The vertical axis is lap time in seconds. The horizontal axis measures how close the car ahead was: further left means closer. All drivers' laps appear as faint white dots, and the drivers you select are drawn in their team colour. A red dashed line marks the value 2 on the horizontal scale as a reference. Loading takes several minutes because every lap's telemetry is read.

What to look for. Points that are both far left and high are laps where a driver sat close behind another car and was slow, the classic sign of being stuck in dirty air. If a driver's laps further right are clearly quicker, traffic was costing them time; if their pace is the same at every distance, they were limited by their own car rather than the car ahead.

Data and caveats. Lap times and the distance to the car ahead from the official F1 timing feed, processed with FastF1 and published by TracingInsights. Although the axis is labelled in seconds, it is calculated as the average distance to the car ahead in metres divided by the session's fastest lap time, so treat it as a relative measure of closeness rather than an exact time gap. Only laps within 107% of each driver's own fastest are shown.