[Feature Request] Map shadow cars for pit-stops

[gabriele-v]

Hello,
thank you for the website, it's really useful to follow races!

One suggestion for the track map: would be possible to add ghost/shadow cars for pit-stops?

For each race you should add somewhere in the backend a parameter with the time lost with pit-stop.
Then there should be a collapsable driver list where you can select for each driver ghost/shadow car in front and/or behind.
Once enabled, it will show a "shadow/lighter" icon on the map that it's running X secs ahead or behind the real car, so you can immediately know if a driver pits where will come out.

Step 2 would be to have two other parameters, one for VSC and another for SC and in case VSC or SC is out, you will automatically switch to that time instead of the standard one.

Thanks!

[slowlydev]

Hey there, thank you for the issue!

It's an amazing Idea u have there, but I think displaying the ghosts on the map, with x amount of seconds the ahead or behind would be quite the challenge and as of now I don't quite have an Idea on how to solve this.

The kind of data we have is:
past pit stop times (of the race and technically also of past races).
current and past racing driver position (x, y, z on map)

A feature that I want to implement is that u can see in what position the driver would get out when pitting. Which would be one step into the direction of your idea.

I planned it to look something like this:

What are your thoughts on this? Any ideas? Also feel free to open PRs :)

[gabriele-v]

Hi,
from developer side I understand that your suggestion it's easier to implement, but from user perspective I think is not immediate as seeing the projection of the car position on the map. It's anyway a good step forward in order to better understand strategies.

Regarding how to implement what I've suggested, I don't know which data you are caching, but what about use the car position X seconds ago? Something like the delay that you have for overall data, you may consider using the same logic.
It won't work for the ghost car in front, but we could simplify it adding only ghosts behind that are also easier to understand for most of users.

In both cases anyway if you have only pit-stop times of the session, some math should be done in order to get a correct estimation excluding extreme values. I don't think past races pit-stop times is useful, because time lost going through the pitlane is different for each track.

Thanks!

[Mighty-Eagle27]

Why not use something like the Sky Circle of Doom?
It is essentially a track map but in a circle. I would use the time delta between the drivers to calculate the angular difference between them on the circle.
Create a dropdown to select the car you want to see where it comes
out and create a 21st car or any marker, that will have the angular difference of the pitstop time loss delta

Here a mockup: