Time deltas are one of the least intuitive things you can put in front of a fan.
If we tell you a driver qualified +0.175s ahead, that is precise and completely unfeelable. Almost nobody has an internal sense of a tenth of a second. It just stays a number.
So we tried a different way to show it: turn the time gap into physical distance on the track, and draw it to scale.
A tenth of a second, in metres
The idea is simple. A gap in time becomes a gap in space once you know the speed.
At the sort of pace an F1 car carries across the line, roughly 300 km/h, that works out to about 83 metres every second. So a tenth of a second is around 8 metres of track. A gap of +0.175s becomes about 14 metres, roughly three car lengths. At the 2026 Austrian Grand Prix, the gap from pole to sixth was +0.389s, which is about 35 metres of track. On circuits where the field spreads out, a full grid can stretch past 150 metres.
