Takuma Sato braked a fraction too late in the pit lane, skidded across his markings and then asked the AI what he had done wrong
In motorsport, a few hundredths of a second can make all the difference, not only on the race track but also in the pit lane. IndyCar driver Takuma Sato learned this the hard way when he overshot his mark during his pit stop in the Indy 500, had to be pushed back and lost a lot of time as a result. After the race, the Japanese driver consulted the voice AI ChatGPT to analyze his mistake – with an exciting result.
“I messed up and missed my braking point by six feet,” said Sato after the legendary Indianapolis 500. “People said, ‘Maybe you should have braked a second earlier.’ I thought, ‘That’s right.’ But of course I had to look at the details. That’s why I consulted ChatGPT.”
His prompt: “I’m driving at 60 miles per hour in the pit lane, but I’ve gone six feet too far. How much earlier should I have braked to hit the markings?” The answer: “Seven hundredths! That’s how much earlier I should have braked, which is less than a hundredth. That would have brought me to a perfect stop.”
Now let’s take this data and convert it to meters, and ChatGPT says that Sato had to brake 1.88 meters earlier to make a perfect pit stop. In seven hundredths of a second, the car covers 1.88 meters at 96.5 kilometers per hour. So it’s the small details that matter: one small mistake and even an experienced driver like Sato loses many valuable seconds.
Sato finished the Indy 500 in ninth place in the top 10. The 48-year-old took part in the legendary IndyCar race for the 16th time in 2025, having already won it twice: in 2017 and 2020. 2022 was his last full-time season. Since then, the Japanese driver has only raced in the Indy 500, most recently for Rahal Letterman Lanigan Racing. It was his sixth top 10 finish of his career on the oval at Indianapolis Motor Speedway.
