GALE FORCE F1
GALE FORCE F1
27 May 1995 GALE FORCE F1 was born. It was a sunny afternoon in Monaco, but we were not on the beach! We were busy ramming more memory into the web server, our new Monaco Grand Prix Page was being sucked all over the planet and the disk was going nuts. From this scene came the idea to make a fast results service for the other Grand Prix as well.
2 July 1995 The first Grand Prix we covered was the French Grand Prix. All the race times and results were published within 15 minutes of each session ending.
27 July 1995 We started to host the Atlas Formula 1 Team website.
3 August 1995 We started to host the Official Pacific Formula 1 Team site.
13 August 1995 The Hungarian Grand Prix saw our first session reports and also the creation of the Results Mailing List.
31 March 1996 Much software work over the winter produced two break throughs in motor sports Internet reporting. Both these debuted at the Brazillian Grand Prix.
  • 3D models: after the qualifying session we created a 3D VRML model showing the time relative car positions on a model grid.
  • LIVE Reports:: using dynamic page updating we also started to cover the sessions live on the Internet.
14 June 1996 After much popular demand we added a Headline News service at the Canadian Grand Prix and changed the front page to more of a magazine format.
October 1996 Atlas Formula 1 Team leave the GALE FORCE servers to setup their own dedicated domain.
16 June 1997 GALE FORCE developed the Java Top Six Applet which draws a graphic on the viewers screen showing the Top Six cars in time relative positions. First used on the timing pages of the Canadian Grand Prix.
29 June 1997 French Grand Prix: First use of the Java Top Six Applet during live race coverage. Viewers can see on screen the relative gaps between the top six drivers. Updated in real time.
22 July 1998 With the increasing demand on our network bandwidth (especially during live coverage) we were looking for ways to provide the same information but with less bytes.  The Extended Java Information Display system was our solution.  By creating a Java formatting applet for the client browser we can now show the Live Qualifying Page using just 2,000 bytes of compressed data  instead of 9,000 bytes of html.
12 August 1998 Birth of the WaterFall display.  This java applet uses data from our live coverage systems to show a map of the race like a water fall.  Each lap is a horizontal band with the top 10 cars places in time relative positions.  Lines link the cars lap by lap to produce the water fall effect and show their relative gains and losses during the race.
3 March 1999 Moved site to new address http://www.galeforcef1.com.   Changed layout to use frames so that we can easily spread the page generation over several servers.

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GALE FORCE F1 - the fastest results service on the internet