Cognitive load
How hard the brain is working into each braking zone, each overtake, each restart: the load that decides where the lap time goes.
SPARK MOTORSPORT · Neurotechnology for motorsport
Car telemetry records everything the car does. SPARK MOTORSPORT adds what it cannot see: the driver's cognitive load, attention and fatigue, measured from the brain and aligned with the telemetry, corner by corner.
Three layers of the human, on the same timeline as throttle, brake and position.
How hard the brain is working into each braking zone, each overtake, each restart: the load that decides where the lap time goes.
When focus narrows, when vigilance drops across a stint, and which corners pay for it.
Heart and oxygenation next to the brain signal, so mental effort is told apart from physical effort.
Heart rate and breathing rise with physical effort and with mental effort alike. From the outside, a heavy braking zone and a moment of doubt look the same. Only a signal taken from the brain separates the two.
Synchronised with telemetry, that signal becomes a channel an engineer can work with: the lap where load peaked, the corner where attention dropped, the stint where fatigue set in. It turns "the driver felt off" into data.
The one channel car telemetry cannot reach.
A cockpit is the hardest place to read a brain. Most brain-sensing setups stay in the simulator or the lab; the SPARK instrument is engineered for the car itself.
High-frequency vibration through the seat, the chassis and the helmet.
Sustained braking and cornering loads on the head and the neck.
Closed cockpits and long stints, with capture running to the flag.
A head that never stops moving, and a signal that has to stay clean through it.
Your mental state lap by lap and corner by corner, next to your lap times. Progress you can finally measure.
A human channel aligned with the data you already trust, to the thousandth of a second, and an algorithmic debrief you can act on.
An objective read on driver development, from karting and academies to GT, endurance and single-seaters.
It is the measurement of the driver's brain activity, typically by EEG, to understand cognitive load, attention and fatigue behind the wheel. SPARK MOTORSPORT does it on board, in the car, and aligns it with the telemetry.
Vibration, G-load and head movement are the main obstacles to reading a brain signal in a car, which is why most studies stay in the simulator. The SPARK instrument is engineered for exactly those conditions.
Telemetry tells you what the car did. SPARK tells you what the driver did and why: the load, attention and fatigue behind each input, on the same timeline.
Yes. The same core reads the driver on track and in the simulator, so the two can be compared on one scale.
Drivers, race engineers, teams, academies and driver development programmes, across karting, GT, endurance, single-seaters and two-wheel racing.
SPARK is fitted programme by programme. Request access and someone on the team answers you personally.
What a racing driver's cognitive load is, why it costs lap time and how to measure it with questionnaires, EEG and heart signals. What the science says.
Read the article Resources · 5 min readMotion, vibration, electrodes, synchronisation: why measuring a driver's brain activity inside a car is so hard, and what the published studies actually show.
Read the articleWorkload, attention and oxygenation, read in the simulator and in the cockpit, for the people who train and assess pilots.
Explore the domain SPARK SPORTFocus, composure and mental fatigue, measured in training, so the decisive moment is prepared rather than hoped for.
Explore the domainMotorsport, aviation, sport. One neural core, engineered for the extreme.
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