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The Fastest Pit Stop Ever Is Less Than Two Seconds!

I’ll be up front with you: I’m really not that into F1. Maybe this would change if I paid more attention to it, but as it stands, it just looks to me like a lot of identical, loud, brightly painted cars driving super duper quickly and not having as many fun crashes as NASCAR. But even I have to give credit where it’s due – and in this case, to Williams, for pulling off the fastest, most incredible pit stop in F1 history.

It’s so fast that the first time I watched it, I missed the whole thing because I was still trying to put the video into fullscreen mode. The video shows the semi-superhuman Williams pit crew, racing in Azerbaijan, completing the stop for Felipe Massa in just 1.92 seconds, getting the car off the ground and replacing all four wheels in about a tenth the time it takes for most NASCAR teams, just for context.

It’s so fast that even as I watched this video back at only a quarter speed I could still only barely keep track of what’s happening. It looks like they use three or four people just to change one wheel. Let me put it this way: they show the pit stop three times, complete with the car arriving, stopping, and leaving each time, and the video is still only 29 seconds long.

But the kicker? The time in the video was wrong. After analyzing the collected data after the race, the Williams boffins concluded that the real time was actually just 1.89 seconds, a significant margin when we’re talking about such blindingly fast times.

I think I’m starting to figure out why F1 is so damn expensive.

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