Reference lap analysis
A reference lap is a lap borrowed from a different session and loaded into the one you're analyzing. Use it to compare today against your personal best, one car against another, or your lap against someone else's.
The lap now behaves like any other lap in the session:
Right-click it to Rename it something meaningful, or Remove Reference Lap when you're done. Load as many as you like.
A borrowed lap is timed from this session's start/finish, not from its own.
That matters because two sessions at one track don't always agree where the line is — 41 m apart in a measured case, which is most of a second at racing speed. Measured from its own line, a borrowed lap put every corner at the wrong distance on the distance axis, and on the track map its car started up the road from yours and the slower lap finished ahead. Timed from your line, the two cars start together and a lap a second and a half slower ends a second and a half behind.
A lap borrowed from somewhere your session never went is left on its own timing instead — the picker warns you when the two traces never come near each other, but it doesn't stop you loading it.
A reference lap brings its own channels with it. If the borrowed session logged something this one doesn't — say it had a wideband and this car doesn't — that channel appears in the Channels list as its own row and plots for the reference lap.
Channels are matched by name, ignoring case and separators, so Water Temp and water_temp are treated as the same channel across two different loggers.
When a reference lap is loaded, rows carry a small badge: