It’s almost impossible to explain or envision one one thousandth of a second.
Technically, its a measurement of time, but it is so minuscule that no human eye could ever calculate the difference between 0.001 and 0.000 seconds. If you wanted to try, go ahead and watch this video from last weekend’s NASCAR race (the Advent Health 400) and see if you can determine who won between Kyle Larson (the number 5 car) and Chris Buescher (the number 17 car):
That right there was the closest finish that the NASCAR Cup Series has ever seen, and after further review, it was concluded that Larson beat out Buescher by 0.001 seconds. That’s really unbelievable, and it is still hard to tell which driver is victorious when you watch the finish in super slow motion:
And it doesn’t help that the finish line may or may not have been crooked. That’s a whole other thing that you can read more about here.
But you might have watched that and been skeptical that one driver could be crowned a winner over the other. If you thought that, you aren’t alone. NASCAR driver Denny Hamlin spoke on the photo finish on the Actions Detrimental podcast, and he wasn’t so sure that the clocking of 0.001 seconds was accurate:
“I almost feel like the 0.001 is just a made up number at this point. How can they say it’s 0.001, if the electronics say the other way around?
I have timing and scoring in my bus, right by my couch, so I can kind of watch races and watch lap times, and pay attention to some things and it said triple zeros on mine, as well. That’s what I’m saying. I think it’s just made up.”
We’ve got a NASCAR clock denier over here.
You can’t discredit what Hamlin is saying though, and if he does have his own timing and scoring system and it didn’t show the same numbers that NASCAR is parading around, could the racing association have fudged the figures a bit?
I don’t want to start a NASCAR conspiracy by any means, but in other sports, a review is only concluded when there is “incontrovertible evidence” for a certain result. With the jagged finish line, and the one one hundredth of a second difference, it’s hard to say with full confidence that Larson was the winner.
Hamlin felt the same way, and suggested that no one should have been given the title of victor after the race:
“You can’t tell time by a by a single photo. You can’t. You see an inch, but you don’t know. You can’t quantify that, in time. That’s why I’m saying if timing and scoring showed triple zeros, as a tie, like I think they just add the one on the end, just to say it was closer. Because they can’t say it’s triple zeros, because then people would say, ‘We got a tie then, it’s a tie.'”
You can hear more from Denny Hamlin on “NASCAR’s closest finish” in the video below:
