What does a pace of "28.9" or "28.1" mean?

Question

I like to hear the conversations between the engineer and the driver. One of the conversations they have is talking about the pace. For example, when Checo asked for his and Max's pace, his engineer said:

Your pace is 28.9 while's Max is 28.1.

My question is, what does this number mean? It must not be the lap time since, as far as I know, the lap time should be more than a minute.

Answer 1

The driver knows what the lap times are more or less, so they just leave off saying "1 minute" - adding that into the communication would just slow things down and not add any information.

Brevity is of important when communicating over a noisy channel.