Lights Out: F1 Start Reaction Times and What to Expect

Five red lights, one after another, then a pause that feels far too long, then darkness. A Formula 1 start is one of the purest reaction tests in sport, and it is the model for Lights Out. Here is how the real procedure works, what the research says about reacting to it, and what a good score looks like.

How the game works

1. The gantry starts dark for a second. Input is ignored here, so you can settle.
2. The five red lights come on one per second.
3. After the fifth light comes a random hold of 1.5 to 5 seconds. Then all the lights go out together, and you tap as fast as you can.

Tapping while any light is still on is a jump start. On Easy you just redo the rep. On Medium and Hard the set starts again, so guessing is expensive. A tap under 100 ms after lights-out also counts as a false start, because nobody can see the change and respond that quickly. They anticipated it.

Your time runs from the frame on which the lights actually disappear from the screen to the moment your finger touches it. It does not run from when the code asked for the change. The lights are switched off in a single frame, with no fade, so there is no half-dark frame to argue about.

The real thing: how F1 starts are run

In Formula 1 the five red lights come on at one-second intervals once the grid has stopped. The race starts when they all go out, and the FIA deliberately makes that moment unpredictable. Its recommended start procedure, which is modelled on F1's, says that after the last light comes on, “after a preset delay of between 0.2 and 3.0 seconds, the race is started by all the red start lights being extinguished.” Sometimes the hold is very short. At the 2019 French Grand Prix the lights went out about 0.8 seconds after the fifth came on, and the race director confirmed this was within the rules.

Our hold is longer, 1.5 to 5 seconds, and its length is drawn so that the lights are no more likely to go out at any one moment than another. That matters. With a predictable gap you could start your tap early and time it, which would turn the game into rhythm rather than reaction.

Jump starts in F1 are judged by a transponder on each car that detects whether it has moved more than a small preset distance before the lights go out. A little movement is tolerated, because drivers make tiny clutch adjustments on the grid. Our version has no tolerance: any touch before lights-out is a jump start.

How fast do F1 drivers react?

Less is published than you might expect. Teams log start data, but there is no peer-reviewed dataset of driver start reactions. The best-documented case is Valtteri Bottas at the 2017 Austrian Grand Prix. His start looked so good that rivals suspected a jump start, and the FIA cleared him. His reaction was given as 0.201 seconds, and Sebastian Vettel said afterwards that around 0.2 seconds would be normal.

Keep in mind what that figure includes. A driver reacts with a hand on a clutch paddle, and the measurement runs until the car moves. In our game you only have to move a fingertip a few millimetres to a glass screen. Faster-looking claims for famous drivers circulate online, but we couldn't trace any of them to a reliable source, so we've left them out.

What the research says about reaction speed

Simple visual reaction time

Lights Out is a simple reaction: one possible signal and one possible response. In a large lab study by Woods and colleagues (2015), the average simple visual reaction time was 231 ms. That fell to 213 ms once the delay added by the screen and mouse, about 18 ms, was taken out. Reaction time also slowed by about half a millisecond per year of age. Online tests run slower because home equipment adds lag. Human Benchmark's reaction test currently reports a median of 273 ms and warns that a computer can add 10 to 50 ms.

Why the countdown helps

The five lights are a warning signal, and warning signals make people faster. Psychologists call the gap between a warning and the signal the foreperiod. A classic review by Niemi and Näätänen (1981) pulled together decades of work on it. A warning lets you build up readiness, and when the delay is variable, reactions get faster the longer you've been waiting, because the signal feels increasingly due.

The random hold is what stops that readiness from turning into guessing. When the chance of the lights going out stays the same from moment to moment, anticipating gains you nothing, and you have to wait for the event itself.

What score to expect

Expect your Lights Out times to be a little faster than on the plain tap test. The light sequence gives you something to prepare against. Expect them to be more variable, too. A long hold makes you tense up and creep towards a jump start, and the fear of a reset makes some players wait a beat too long.

How to get faster

• Watch the whole gantry, not one light. All the lights go out at once, so peripheral vision catches the change as well as looking straight at it.
• Be ready, not tense. Rest your finger just above the screen. A clenched hand is slower to move.
• Don't count the hold. It is random by design. Counting only tempts you to jump.
• Train on Medium or Hard. Losing the whole set to one jump start teaches the patience that real starts need.

For general advice, see how to improve your reaction time. For where the milliseconds in any reaction test come from, see how reaction tests work.

Sources

1. FIA, Recommended light signals (International Sporting Code, Appendix H).
2. Autosport, Quick change of start lights inside FIA tolerances (2019 French GP).
3. PlanetF1, Bottas start within allowed tolerances; ESPN, Vettel questions Bottas' perfect start (2017 Austrian GP).
4. Woods, D. L. et al. (2015). Factors influencing the latency of simple reaction time. Frontiers in Human Neuroscience, 9, 131.
5. Human Benchmark, Reaction Time Test (median published on the test page).
6. Niemi, P. & Näätänen, R. (1981). Foreperiod and simple reaction time. Psychological Bulletin, 89(1), 133–162.