High pressure solid state transformations at high strain rates are usually observed after the fact, either during static holding or after unloading, or inferred from interferometry measurements of the sample surface. The emergence of femtosecond X-ray diffraction techniques provides insight into the dynamics of short-timescale events such as shocks. We report laser pump-probe experiments of the response of Zr to laser driven shocks over the first few nanoseconds of the shock event, enabling the α → ω transition and orientation relationship to be observed in real time with picosecond resolution. A clear orientation relationship of (1010)α|| (1011)ω is found, in conflict with ω → α annealing experiments in zirconium and the two α → ω pathways proposed for titanium.The dynamics of materials subject to ultrafast shocks are of fundamental interest. At high strain rates deformation may be effected by the movement of interfaces during twinning and displacive phase transformations, in addition to conventional dislocation-mediated plasticity 1 . The α → ω phase transformation in hexagonal close packed metals is of particular importance because the high-pressure ω-phase is brittle, which may give rise to failure in metals that would be otherwise suited to a range of applications 2 .In this paper we report the first direct experimental observation of the α → ω phase transition in a hexagonal close packed metal, α-Zr, under shock conditions, employing recently developed 3-6 laser pump-probe experiments using the X-ray free electron laser (XFEL) to perform femtosecond X-ray diffraction (XRD) at the linac coherent light source of the Stanford linear accelerator center (CXI station, LCLS, SLAC). Pump-probe experiments use a femtosecond XFEL pulse to take an XRD snapshot (the probe) at a precise time delay after a shock pulse from an optical laser (the pump). By repeating this operation on statistically equivalent samples a time-ordered data set is produced, yielding a dynamic representation of the shock response.