In the current era, when they’re not on track, drivers are surrounded by monitors in a bid to absorb a wealth of data that might just help them extract that little bit of extra performance. Back in the day, everything was lap times. Some things don’t change though, such as the driver being hungry for feedback the moment the car stops – if not before – as demonstrated here by Tyler Alexander handing Bruce McLaren his times while the car is pushed back towards the garage at Brands Hatch in the 1968 British Grand Prix.

A big change for F1 was the advent of live timing, piped directly to the team. Very useful for all concerned – except perhaps the driver, strapped into the car and not usually able to see a monitor. The natural solution was to balance a monitor on the forward bulkhead, giving the driver access to the data from the cockpit. The technology moved on over the years – though it encountered an unexpected hurdle with the arrival of the halo, which necessitated the split-screen approach.

More screen real-estate does, however, have its advantages, allowing the drivers to study sector and micro-sector times, GPS information, weather radar, temperatures as well as the live feed and lap times. Looking at this shot of Ayrton Senna from Montreal in 1991 and the sparsity of information, one marvels at the preternatural skill that so often allowed him to pick the gap in qualifying traffic for that last-second pole position lap.

When it comes to timing, in the modern era the numbers alone are not enough. With undercuts calculated to the millisecond, tyre choices being decisive, and races decided by fine margins, context is everything, Thus, everyone on the pit wall is faced with a bank of 4K ultra-high definition Dell monitors, each configured to their personal needs with many different windows. The PCs powering the pit wall are also from Dell: they’re small but powerful and allow the engineers to run all the applications they need with minimal effort. It’s a far cry from the rather more basic pit wall being modelled here by Martin Brundle at the 1994 Spanish Grand Prix. 

It’s difficult to imagine how a garage would function without access to a TV feed and timing data – but when those things first appeared in the garage, they really were something of an afterthought. There’s no absolute requirement for the garage crew to have the information, but it’s difficult to imagine how the race would function were they deprived. The screens have gradually grown in size, from humble origins such as this image from the 1995 British Grand Prix in the old Silverstone pitlane, with the team clustered around a single, tiny monitor, to the current garage wrapped with a video wall, carrying pictures, timing data, and good luck social posts from our fans. 

On track today a driver is in constant communication with his race engineer, who will feed him timing data. They can also see simplified data on the steering wheel. Sometimes, however, the comms fail, or the data doesn’t get through to the car. That’s when the pit-board comes in handy – it does not break. Even when not required, the pit signallers will still be looking at a timing display and hanging it out every lap. Some drivers just find it comfortable – or maybe they like to think of themselves back in the golden age, like this image from the 1969 Mexican Grand Prix with Bruce (who could not start) looking on as Denny Hulme drives to victory. 

While systems on the car can’t be controlled from the pitlane, a driver can receive outside information, with the McLaren Applied PCU-8D steering wheel OLED display supplying up to 100 pages of information. Too much information is as bad as too little, so the driver usually restricts themselves to vital messages: delta times for Safety Cars, Virtual Safety Cars and qualifying in-laps; up or down on a previous qualifying lap. It’s a little bit more sophisticated than the messaging system used on James Hunt’s M23. 

The stopwatch is a sporting icon, nowhere more so than in motor racing. In the early decades of F1, when a whole team, all the kit and both cars could fit into one truck, responsibility for operating the stopwatch and making the lap chart fell on whoever wasn’t busy with something else. That often meant – and bear in mind, this was a different age – wives and girlfriends. By the early 1970s, the beautiful, heavy, mechanical stopwatches had been replaced by the early electronic models – as demonstrated here by Maria-Helena Fittipaldi at Watkins Glen, recording Emo on his way to securing both titles for McLaren. In an age of timing loops, transponders and telemetry, we don't need a stopwatch for lap and split-times anymore – but they still come in handy and we never leave home without a couple. Here’s team manager Paul James studying pit-stop practice. You could do it on a phone – but that wouldn’t be the same.