We're on board with Lando Norris as he speeds out of Zandvoort's penultimate corner. Norris looks on course for a crucial pole, until suddenly the airbox of a second McLaren flashes through the screen. Team-mate Oscar Piastri has had a slightly better exit and drifts away from us through the banking final corner onto the main straight, claiming pole by what seem to be inches. The difference between victory and defeat is 0.012s, and thanks to Formula 1's new ghost car tool we're able to visually exactly what that looks like.
Amid the tightest F1 grid ever, the tense Dutch GP qualifying session has been the rule rather than the exception in 2025. Helping make sense of those unfathomably tiny qualifying margins this year is FOM's latest ghost car tool. By using enhanced GPS and timing data, ghost cars can be overlayed onto replays to compare the performance of two cars, giving a helpful visual indicator of where driver A loses time to driver B, who has taken the best line through a corner or how much a car's lack of top speed is really costing a driver on the straights.
