Sorry que esta en inglés pero me da tigra traducirlo, está interesante, lo encontré buscando info sobre el reloj de Massa.
How useful is a fast watch? In F1, it's all about timing
By Brad Spurgeon International Herald Tribune
THURSDAY, MARCH 30, 2006
Most people think motor racing is about speed - fast cars, engines, tires, maybe even women. Wrong. Motor racing is all about timing. Drivers are not after speed for its own sake. The buzz comes from lap times, braking times, acceleration times, pit stop times and the precise, marginal differences between them that build incrementally to the outcome of the race.
Motor racing and timepieces, motor racing and chronometry, have always gone together. Rarely is the association stronger than in Grand Prix racing, where the technology of the cars is the ultimate expression of precision timing.
It is also why, up and down the pit lane, race drivers, team owners and engineers have always been fascinated by watches, and why watch companies flood into the sport with devices ranging from stopwatches to wristwatches to lap-time counters. The racing teams use the timekeeping industry to develop their competitive edge, and the timekeeping industry uses the sport to develop its watches.
"Motor racing obliges us to take on challenges to make instruments that would otherwise seem impossible," said Stéphane Linder, product development director at TAG Heuer of Switzerland.
Few brands are as closely connected to motor racing as TAG Heuer, which has been involved with fast cars for nearly a century, and with Formula One for nearly 40 years.
"Each brand of luxury watch has a unique connection like this - some may be a jewel brand to an emperor, for instance - we are very much connected to the field of sports cars, beautiful cars and motor racing," said Jean- Christophe Babin, president and chief executive of TAG Heuer. "Motor racing is by far the No. 1 sport in terms of investment and uniqueness of the brand."
Edouard Heuer patented the first stopwatch - which measured to one-fifth of a second - in 1869. In 1911 his company made the first car dashboard chronograph. In 1916 it created a stopwatch called the Micrograph, which measured to one-hundredth of a second, and in 1933 it made a dashboard timekeeper for race cars and airplanes.
But it was in 1969, as a sponsor to Jo Siffert, the Swiss driver, that it became one of the first nonautomotive sponsors in Formula One. In 1971 it started an eight-year relationship with Ferrari as official timekeeper - putting its name on the car and creating a sophisticated timing system at the team's Fiorano test track.
That system was a precursor to the computer telemetry that has since become the standard way of analyzing how to make a racing car go faster. Ferrari used nearly 50 photocells and timers to analyze how its cars accelerated, decelerated and cornered on all parts of the track.
Modern timing systems have taken a giant step forward from there to attack one of the most crucial tactical questions in racing - when will the opposition stop in the pits to refuel and change tires? That is a key factor in deciding when to make one's own stop.
Pit stop analysis is now done with optical character recognition and computers. Teams follow each race on television screens that show sector-by-sector sub-lap times for all cars on the track. A lap that takes 90 seconds, for example, may be broken down into three sectors of perhaps 30 seconds, 45 seconds and 15 seconds.
Teams now take screen shots of the television image of the sector time numbers, lap by lap, for rival cars. The snapshots are read by optical character recognition and converted into data, on the basis of which computer analysis calculates acceleration and braking patterns, likely fuel loads and consumption rates, and consequently the likely timing of the next pit stop.
"It's both a science and an art," said one team computer expert, who asked that he remain nameless. "All the teams do it, although none are supposed to. It's against the rules."
Back in the legitimate timekeeping world, TAG Heuer in 2003 expanded its range from Formula One to become official timekeeper in the Indy Racing League and Indianapolis 500 race in the United States, where, with small oval tracks and cars that are technologically very similar to one another, timekeeping is done to one-10,000th of a second.
"Our technical team needs new challenges and Indy 500, with the 10,000th of a second, was really for the whole timing team an incredible challenge, and also unique," Babin said.
Watch companies also use Formula One drivers to perform live tests on their watches.
On the driver's wrist, on the track in a Formula One car, a watch is exposed to acceleration forces and vibrations that cannot be simulated under laboratory conditions.
Felipe Massa, a Brazilian driver at Ferrari, wears a watch made by Richard Mille, a Swiss watchmaker who started production in 2000 and considers his brand the Formula One of the watch industry.
The Richard Mille Tourbillon RM 009, developed with Massa and made in a limited edition of 25 pieces, aims to be the lightest mechanical watch ever made.
It has the world's first aluminum-lithium movement baseplate, a case in aluminum AS7G-silicium-carbon, and weighs 30 grams, or 1.06 ounces, without the bracelet.
Formula One has become a mine for watch companies in the development of new materials.
Formula One engineers, for instance, are experts in the use of Grade 5 titanium, which they use in accelerator pedals, gearboxes and parts of the transmission.
"We saw this material they were using and it looked extremely interesting, because it's very light, very solid and very high tech," said Linder of TAG Heuer. "So that's a material that we use in certain watches that are also very high tech, like certain collector's pieces."
It is used for the case on TAG Heuer's Kirium F1 model, for instance, since it is much lighter than steel but more scratch-resistant, and shines like white gold or steel. Carbon fiber, a material used for the chassis of Formula One cars, has transferred to watch dials.
The combination of beauty and technology in both cars and watches explains why car people are attracted to watches, Linder said, adding that the objects themselves are very similar.
"In the watch there's the movement, in the car an engine. There's a chassis with the car, and that's the watch box. There are instruments in a car, needle hands as well," he said. "It's also for people who want the best - in a car or a watch - just for themselves, they're purists."
For such people, TAG created the SLR Chronograph, a special edition offered only to buyers of the Mercedes- McLaren SLR sports car.
"Beautiful cars are what we call expensive toys for grown-up boys - as are expensive watches," Babin said.
The car costs €470,000, or $570,000, with the chronograph thrown in for an additional €10,000. About 35 percent of the car's buyers have also bought the watch, Babin said.
http://www.iht.com/articles/2006/03/30/ ... hpower.php
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