Indeed, some people are just stupid.
And, yeah, the telemetry is awesome. You can also do the math in your head pretty easily. Figure it's 6 mph for every 10 kph - so 100 kph is 60 mph.
It's actually like 62.2 mph, but we're good for just estimating speed. So, from that, you can tell they were going about 200 mph down the longest straight section, maybe up to 210 mph.
But, yeah, cars send back that telemetry these days. My modern track cars can all do that. You also have a transponder so that you can tell where the cars are - like on pit road or where on the circuit. It's amazing how much data is being processed at one of these types of events.
It was really interesting to me how the driver was using the gas and brake, and how it showed how much they were pressing those pedals, and how the driver was hitting the brakes fully to 100% every time he touched them and how we had the gas floored at 100% most of the time as well, except the times where he completely took his foot off the gas pedal. I thought that was really interesting to see along with seeing where they were and what he was doing. They probably do that for lots of races now but I rarely watch racing so I was impressed
Other than a few sections, that's pretty much what you do. You're either gaining RPMs as fast as you can, or dropping them as fast as you can. If you're trying to save fuel, you might be a bit less aggressive, but you're normally stomping on one pedal or the other.
Now, there are times where this isn't true - like when you're going through some s-curves and it's faster to maintain a higher average speed through the whole set of curves, but it's normally faster to mash the shit out of either pedal. The circuit at Le Mans is pretty much one of those tracks where you're constantly trying to go as fast as you can.
When the driver was going through something like S curves he just went through generally with no foot on the gas or brakes, kind of coasting through
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