Testing Time

F1 racing is fundamentally a race against time. Yet while time is such a valuable commodity the whole point of the sport is to use as little of it as possible. Whoever takes the least amount of time to finish a race wins. In the business world they say that time is money and that also applies to the business of running an F1 team where all the money is spent trying to go faster to reduce time. And the quicker a team goes, the less time its cars consume on the track, the more money it is likely to make.

The times set by teams while splitting seconds in pre-season testing can be interpreted in various ways. More or less they can be indicators of performance potential when the real racing begins. However, depending on a team's motives the time set in testing can be adapted to suit other purposes.

For a team seeking to impress existing sponsors, or attract new ones, the goal is to make headlines by setting quick times and this, so the cynics say, sometimes leads to suspicions of artificial times being set. During test sessions in the not too distant past, when there were fewer checks on the legality of the equipment, there were reports of the smell of high octane rocket fuel or otherwise illegally exotic propellants emanating from certain exhaust systems. Other keen-eared observers detected strange-sounding engine notes, as if to suggest that some motors used in testing might possibly have a higher rev limit or even a larger capacity than the rules permit. And when a perennial backmarker of a car clocked an unexpectedly quick time in testing it led to suspicions that the car might possibly be running underweight.

It might be assumed that the goal in testing is to set the quickest possible time but even this concept can be challenged. Perhaps some of the potentially frontrunning teams might be sandbagging, deliberately going slower than they are capable of. The tactic here, so the theory goes, is to lull your rivals into a false sense of security and then, when you show devastatingly quick times in the opening races the demoralised opposition is sent scrambling in a frantic race against time to catch up.

Playing tricks with time in F1 may be entirely appropriate since the whole concept of time, even in the real world, is rather nebulous. According to a dictionary definition 'time' is an 'indefinite continuous duration regarded as a dimension in which a sequence of events take place.'John A Wheeler, a learned theoretical physicist defined it thusly: "Time is the thing that stops everything from happening at once." One description that stands the test of time is attributed to the philosopher/theologian St. Augustine (354-430AD), who put it this way (approximately):"Time comes from the future, which doesn't yet exist, into the present which has no duration, and goes in to the past which has ceased to exist."