F1 reaction test, how a five-light start works and what a fair test needs
· 5 min read · Tyamka team
An F1 reaction test copies the five red lights of a Formula 1 start. How the real start works, what driver times are public, and what makes a test fair.
An F1 reaction test copies the start of a Formula 1 race. Five red lights come on one after another, and after a random wait they all go out at once. Formula 1's own site says the wait is chosen by a computer and lasts between 0.2 and 3 seconds, and that drivers launch their cars about 0.2 seconds after the lights go out on average. Online versions let you click when the lights go out and show your time. Our reaction time test has no lights gantry. It starts with one circle and later adds more places and a square you must not tap. It does share the two rules that keep a race start fair, a wait you cannot predict and a cost for going early.
How the five-light start works
According to formula1.com, once the cars are lined up on the grid, five red lights on a gantry above the track come on one by one. Then, after a randomly chosen, computer-controlled wait of between 0.2 and 3 seconds, all five go out together. There is no green light. Lights out is the signal to go.
If the lights always went out exactly one second after the fifth came on, drivers would learn the rhythm and start on timing rather than on the signal. With a wait anywhere from a fifth of a second to three seconds, the way to avoid jumping the start is to watch for the lights going out.
What counts as a jump start in F1
A driver who moves before the lights go out has jumped the start. The FIA judges this with a transponder fitted to each car, which detects movement on the grid. Some small movement is tolerated, but the FIA does not publish how much, as Autosport has reported.
The line in F1 is the moment the lights go out, not a number of milliseconds after it. Sprinting works differently. Under World Athletics rules, the starting system flags a possible false start when an athlete reacts in less than 0.100 seconds after the gun, and the starter then decides. The article on the fastest reaction time covers that rule and why it is not a hard human limit.
Where the 0.2 seconds comes from
The figure most often quoted is the one from formula1.com, that drivers launch about 0.2 seconds after lights out on average. Many sites give more precise numbers, such as a season average or the best start ever, and some say they come from FIA telemetry. We did not find a public FIA dataset of driver reaction times, and those pages do not link to one, so we do not repeat their numbers.
The 0.2 seconds is also a different measurement from your click. It is the time until the car moves. As far as we understand it, that includes the driver seeing the lights go out, releasing the clutch, and the car starting to roll. A click test measures the time until a finger presses a button, plus the delay your screen and mouse add. Comparing a typical online result, such as the Human Benchmark median of about 273 ms, with a driver's roughly 200 ms compares two different things.
What to look for in a reaction test
Two features of the F1 start are worth checking in any reaction test.
- A random wait. If the signal always comes after the same pause, you can learn it. A test should pick a new wait each time from a wide range. The length of the wait also changes the result on its own. In a large lab study by Woods and colleagues, reactions after the shortest pause were about 15% slower than after the longest one.
- A cost for going early. If an early press only restarts the round, guessing costs nothing. You can keep pressing, and now and then a press lands just after the signal and shows a very short time. A test that wants reactions rather than guesses has to penalise them.
How our test handles both
In our game a circle appears after a pause of one to four seconds. The pause is drawn at random for each round from every whole millisecond in that range, so there is no rhythm to learn. The circle has no fade or animation. It is either there or it is not.
A tap before the circle appears is a false start. So is a tap less than 0.12 s after it appears, because we treat a tap that fast as a guess that happened to land after the signal. Either way you lose one of your three lives, the round earns nothing, and the game moves on to the next round. The penalty is there on purpose. For example, someone tapping every 150 milliseconds would, without it, sometimes land just after the circle and look very fast.
The 0.12 s line is our own rule, set when we designed the game. It is not a measured human limit, and it is not an F1 rule.
After each correct tap the game shows your time in milliseconds. The clock starts at the first animation frame after the circle is added to the page, so the screen's own delay and the time your touchscreen or mouse takes to report the tap are inside the number. We have not measured how much that adds in our game. A lab study of web timing found 58 to 133 ms on average, depending on device and browser.
Comparing yourself with a race start
If you use an F1-style test, or ours, compare the result with your own earlier results. Use the same device and browser each time, do several rounds, and look at the middle result rather than the best one. The article on reaction time on a phone and a computer explains why a phone result and a laptop result are not the same measurement, and the article on the reaction time test average gives the numbers from research and from a large online test. A good start in a race depends on far more than the lights, and a short time in a browser says nothing about driving a car.