How HammerTime! decides which laps are trusted — and how you can check our work.
A national board is only worth as much as its times are trustworthy. Here is exactly how a lap earns its status, in plain language. In one line: deterministic physics decides what’s impossible, AI only explains, and a human verifies.
What “verified” means
HammerTime! ranks laps captured from real sim sessions on Marshal. A verified status is our best, evidence-backed judgment that a time is genuine. It is not an official FIA, ACO, or publisher result — see our Terms of Use.
The trust ladder
Where a lap starts depends on the rig it came from:
- Studio / trusted rigs — hardware the league controls. Their laps are treated as authoritative and land verified (after an automatic sanity pass, so corrupt timing never slips through).
- Home rigs — we don’t control them, so their laps must pass automated checks. A clean lap lands unverified (pending) for an organizer to review; physically impossible data is flagged automatically.
How every lap is checked
Each submitted lap runs through the same pipeline, in order:
- Time sanity. The reported lap and sector times must be internally consistent and within plausible bounds. Corrupt or impossible timing is flagged — even on a trusted rig.
- Telemetry evidence. Marshal attaches a compact, downsampled trace to the lap (position, speed, driver inputs, distance around the lap). We check it is complete enough to reason about.
- Deterministic physics checks. The trace is run through fixed, rules-based checks. If the data is physically impossible — speeds or accelerations no car could produce, or a car “teleporting” around the track — the lap is flagged automatically. These checks are conservative on purpose: they target the impossible, not merely the fast, so a genuinely quick lap is never rejected by a machine.
- AI briefing (assist only). An AI reads the results of those checks and writes a short, plain-language summary and a suggestion for the reviewer. It cannot mark a lap verified, and it isn’t handed the raw telemetry to “decide” on its own — it explains the evidence, it does not rule on it.
- Human decision. A person makes the final call on anything that becomes verified. Organizers can verify, flag, correct, or remove a lap.
You can check our work
Every status carries a stored reason. The automated checks are deterministic: the same trace always produces the same result, so a decision can be re-run and audited later rather than taken on trust. If you believe a lap was flagged in error, you can contest it with an organizer and the evidence will be reviewed.
Why we don’t publish the exact limits
We’re open about what we check and who decides — that’s the contract above. We don’t publish the exact numeric thresholds, though, because a published limit is just a recipe for sitting one notch inside it. The thresholds sit well beyond what any real car can do and are tuned over time; the principles here are what we stand behind.
What we store
For verification we keep a compact, downsampled trace alongside your lap — not a full recording of your session. How we handle your data is covered in the Terms of Use.
Questions about a specific lap or status? Reach the organizers through your usual HammerTime! / Cayman sim racing channels. Back to the National Board
