F1 reaction test
Five red lights come on one by one, then go out together after a random delay. React to the lights going out, not before. Without a published norm of its own, your time is compared with the simple reaction time norm, median 228 ms (Human Benchmark, 2026).
When the five lights go out, go.
Watch the five red lights and tap when they all go out, because tapping while they are on is a jump start. You have three starts, and your score is the median.
Space bar works too
How the start works
The five lights come on one per second. Once the fifth is on, the start comes after a random wait between 0.2 and 3 seconds. When all five go out, tap, click or press the space bar. You get three valid starts and your score is the median.
A tap while the lights are still on, or less than 100 ms after they go out, is a jump start and the start is replayed. More than three jump starts void the run.
Why the random delay stops you guessing
If the lights always went out after the same time, you could count and move early. The random wait removes that shortcut, so the only way to be fast is to react. Uncertainty is at the heart of reaction time research. Measuring how long a mental step takes goes back to Donders in 1868 (Donders, 1868), and Hick showed in 1952 that reaction time grows with the uncertainty about which signal will come (Hick, 1952). Here the uncertainty is about when, not which.
Jump starts and impulsivity
Holding still while the lights are on is a small exercise in restraint. A jump start is the same kind of error as tapping on red in the go/no-go test, a ready movement that escapes. If you jump start often, you are trading control for speed.
Your time against the norm
No norm has been published for this exact start. The page compares you with the closest public reference, simple reaction time, where the median is 228 ms across 70,940 online games (Human Benchmark, 2026) and the mean was 231 ms in a lab study of 1,469 adults (Woods et al., 2015a). The two tasks are close but not identical, so read the percentile as a rough position, and compare it with your own reaction time test time.
| Percentile | Score | Reading |
|---|---|---|
| P10 | 178 ms | 10% of games are this fast or faster |
| P25 | 199 ms | 25% of games are this fast or faster |
| P50 | 228 ms | 50% of games are this fast or faster |
| P75 | 264 ms | 75% of games are this fast or faster |
| P90 | 308 ms | 90% of games are this fast or faster |
| P99 | 552 ms | 99% of games are this fast or faster |
And real drivers?
We do not quote reaction times of Formula 1 drivers here, because we have not found a primary source we could check. Figures that circulate online rarely say how they were measured. What we can say is that any time under 100 ms is an anticipation, not a reaction, which is why this test rejects it.
Questions
What is a good F1 reaction time?
Under 228 ms puts you ahead of half of the simple reaction time games online (Human Benchmark, 2026). There is no norm for this exact start yet, so this is a rough guide.
Is there a version with sound?
Not yet. The test is silent so that it measures a visual reaction, like the public norm it is compared with.
What this test does not tell you
It measures your reaction to a light going out on this device. It says nothing about driving skill, racing talent, intelligence or health.
It is a free game in the app and does not count in your card until its own reliability has been measured.
Sources
- Human Benchmark, score distributions embedded in humanbenchmark.com, read on 13 October 2026. Reaction time n 70 940, sequence memory n 35 868, chimp test n 27 233, number memory n 24 084. humanbenchmark.com
- Donders F.C. (1868, translated 1969). On the speed of mental processes. Acta Psychologica 30, 412 to 431. doi.org/10.1016/0001-6918(69)90065-1
- Hick W.E. (1952). On the rate of gain of information. Quarterly Journal of Experimental Psychology 4(1), 11 to 26. doi.org/10.1080/17470215208416600
- Woods D.L., Wyma J.M., Yund E.W., Herron T.J., Reed B. (2015). Factors influencing the latency of simple reaction time. Frontiers in Human Neuroscience 9, 131. doi.org/10.3389/fnhum.2015.00131
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