How to read a lap chart

Published Invalid Date · figures as of the 2026 Singapore Grand Prix, round 17.

Every race page on this site with lap data (every race since 1982) carries two charts. The lap chart shows each driver’s position after every lap; the race-history chart shows each driver’s gap to the leader after every lap. Between them they show how a race unfolded better than the final classification can.

The lap chart

One line per driver, in the team’s colour, from the first lap to the last. The vertical axis is position, first place at the top.
A line that stops is a retirement.
Rings on a line are pit stops. A line that drops several places at a ring and climbs back afterwards is a driver who stopped and rejoined in traffic.
Shaded bands across the chart are safety-car laps; red flags are marked where they happened.
Two lines crossing away from any ring are an overtake on track. Lines crossing at a ring are places exchanged through pit stops.

Reading it in order: find the winner’s line at the top, then look for the lap where it reaches first place and stays there. Each race page states that lap in its summary (“took the lead for good on lap 26, from Gerhard Berger”). Then look at the rings: whether the leaders stopped on the same laps, and who gained at the stops.

The race-history chart

Here the vertical axis is time behind the leader, so a driver matching the leader’s pace draws a flat line, a driver losing time slopes downwards, and a driver closing in slopes upwards. The charts are drawn from the cumulative lap times, so a pit stop appears as a sudden drop of about 20 seconds.

What it shows that the lap chart cannot:

Pace. Two drivers can hold the same positions all afternoon while one pulls away at half a second a lap.
The undercut. A driver who stops a lap before a rival, gains two seconds on fresh tyres, and comes out ahead shows as two lines swapping order around their stops.
Tyre wear. A line that slopes downward more and more steeply is a driver whose tyres are finished.
A safety car. All gaps shrink to a few seconds, and the lines bunch.

Pit stops and stints

Under the charts, the pit-stop table lists each driver’s stops with the lap and, where the data has it, the stationary time, and draws each driver’s race as a bar divided into stints, coloured by tyre compound for races since 2023. The “how the race was won” section compares the podium finishers’ stops and stints.

Example

At the 2026 Singapore Grand Prix the winner’s line never leaves first place: he led all 62 laps. His single ring is at lap 32; the second-placed driver’s two rings are at laps 24 and 39. The race-history chart shows the gap between them growing in the first stint, closing after the second driver’s first stop, and opening again once the leader’s new tyres settled. The race page’s summary says the same in one paragraph, and the charts show where each part of it happened.