SPORT SAFETY
The FIA has been utilising a new electronic marshalling system throughout this season’s FIA Formula One World Championship.
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In order to demonstrate how the system works in practice, consider an imaginary incident and the resulting sequence of events during an F1 race:
• One car’s engine blows up on the approach to a corner.
• The flag marshal sets the preceding light panel to display the red / yellow slippery surface or ‘oil’ flag, alerting race control to the track condition.
• A car spins off the circuit impacting the barriers after the corner.
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The flag marshal sets the light panel to ‘waved yellow’. This sets a sector of the circuit to yellow,
informing race control, and also setting the panel after the incident to green. An automatic message indicating the yellow sector is generated on all teams’ timing screens.
• Software in race control indicates the crashed car’s GPS position (to within 1m) and the nearest marshal post.
• Marshals attend the stricken vehicle.
• As cars pass through the yellow sector, a yellow dashboard light illuminates.
• As the stricken vehicle is in a dangerous position,
race control decides to deploy the safety car using the Marshalling System software. Simultaneously, these events happen:
- The safety car is given the command to leave the pit lane.
- A ‘safety car deployed’ message appears on all timing screens.
- All Light Panels around the circuit display a flashing yellow flag, and an illuminated ‘SC’.
- All CEs go into safety car mode, displaying the target time to pit lane on the car’s dashboard, based on its position on circuit.
• Teams track all cars’ positions using team client software to determine if it is advantageous to pit their car under the safety car.
• Finally, the car involved in the original incident is recovered.
Race control issues the ‘safety car in this lap’ command. As the cars on track complete the lap,
race control issues a ‘track clear’ command, clearing the light panels, the on-board car lights and removing the yellow sectors from the system.
Racing resumes.
http://fialive.fiacommunications.com/en ... n_1209.pdf