FlexRay is a communication protocol heavily promoted on the market by a large group of car manufacturers and automotive electronics suppliers. However, before it can be successfully used for safety-critical applications that require predictability, timing analysis techniques are necessary for providing bounds for the message communication times. In this paper, we propose techniques for determining the timing properties of messages transmitted in both the static and the dynamic segments of a FlexRay communication cycle. The analysis techniques for messages are integrated in the context of a holistic schedulability analysis that computes the worst-case response times of all the tasks and messages in the system. We have evaluated the proposed analysis techniques using extensive experiments. We also present and evaluate three optimisation algorithms that can be used to improve the schedulability of a system that uses FlexRay. © 2007 Springer Science+Business Media, LLC.