Zone analysis
See which corner costs you time.
Vetkuro cuts the lap into the corners you actually drive and the straights between them, then times every one of them on every lap. The gap stops being a number and becomes a place.
At Autodrom Most, the circuit used across these pages, that is twelve zones. Bilster Berg has ten, Brno eight. Every driver on a layout is timed against the same zones, which is what makes a corner-by-corner comparison mean anything. Recording is free, and so is the analysis: Vetkuro is in public beta and has nothing to sell yet.
Web analyzer
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A row per lap, a column per zone
Each column is one corner or straight, in the order you drive them. The last column is the lap time.
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Two numbers in a cell
On top, the time lost against the fastest run through that zone on the table; underneath, the zone time itself. “Best” marks the lap that set it.
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The darker, the costlier
One color scale for the whole table, so the most expensive corner is the one you see first. Here it is T4-T5-T6 on lap 8: 0.396 s.
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Best zones, added up
The fastest time in every zone makes the theoretical best, 1:56.988. Lap 9 is 0.850 s away from it, most of it in T1.
01 What a zone is
A corner, or the straight after it.
A zone covers one corner the way drivers take it, not the way the road is drawn. It opens before the braking point, because drivers place the car well before they touch the brakes, and it closes where the car stops accelerating and stops turning.
Whatever is left between two corners, neither accelerating nor turning, is the straight. Braking, apex and exit sit in one zone, so the time a corner costs is counted where it was lost, not spread over the straight that follows.
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Corner
From the earlier of the braking point or the turn-in, to where the car has stopped both accelerating and cornering.
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Fast bend
A bend too gentle to look like a corner on a map, found from the load the cars pull through it. A kink taken at 0.9 G is a corner whatever its radius.
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Straight
What is left between two corners. Mostly a measure of the car; the part you control is the exit speed you bring onto it.
02 Where the boundaries come from
Nothing here was drawn by hand. The zones come from laps that were driven.
No one places gates on your circuit and nothing is imported from a track database. Vetkuro reads the laps recorded on that layout, up to twenty-four of them across sessions, weights them by how good the GPS was, and works out where the corners are.
Each zone boundary is a gate across the track, the same kind of line as a start/finish or sector line, so a zone time is measured exactly the way a lap time is. A layout nobody has driven yet has no zones at all; it needs at least three usable laps before the first set forms.
Zone sets are versioned. When a new version is published, the sessions on that layout are timed again against it, so two sessions are always compared on the same gates.
Honest note
While the gates are still settling, the analyzer says so on the table, and zone times can shift when a session is processed again.
Clean laps only
Hide a lap caught in traffic and the session is analyzed again on the clean set. The lap still counts for your stats and the leaderboard; it just stops setting zone times.
03 The strip at the bottom
Click a zone, the whole workspace follows.
The zone bar under the graphs is also the lens on the lap. Pick a zone and the charts, the map and the video all narrow to it. The color on the table and the color on the bar are the same scale, so the worst zone is the one that is hardest to miss.
Autodrom Most · lap 9, the session best, against the best run in each zone
9 Oct 2026- Within 0.020 s
- 0.020 to 0.080 s
- 0.080 to 0.150 s
- Over 0.150 s
- Width follows the zone's length
- Zone
- T1
- Corner
- Length
- 216 m
- Lap 9
- 7.123 s
- best 6.866 s, lap 10
- Still to find
- +0.257 s
- Largest gap of 12 zones
04 Zones and sectors are not rivals
Sectors still split the lap. Zones explain it.
Sector lines are yours: you draw them on the layout and they split the lap into named parts you can compare against official timing. Zones are finer and automatic, and they are what the theoretical best lap is built from.
| Aspect | Sectors | Zones |
|---|---|---|
| Who places them | A driver, in the layout editor | Vetkuro, from driven laps |
| How many | Usually three | One per corner and straight |
| Answers | Which part of the lap | Which corner, and why |
Three things a zone table will not do.
It is precise because it is narrow.
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Not a coaching instruction
It shows which corner and how much. What to change there is between you, the traces and whoever knows your car.
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Not there on day one
A new layout gets zones once enough laps have been driven on it. Until then you have the lap, the sectors and the delta.
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Not a comparison of cars
Your best run in a zone is measured against your own laps. A faster car on the straight says nothing about your driving.
