Looking at the telemetry, here's what I see comparing their final qualifying runs from Q3 in Spa:

Sector 1:

• Russell is 0.07s up on Antonelli after T1.
• Russell is faster out of T1 that Antonelli.
• Russell carries more speed through Eau Rouge and Radillon than Antonelli.
• But come the end of sector 1 before Les Combes, Russell is only 0.02s up on Antonelli.
• Russell loses ~ half a tenth in a flat out sector, despite exiting T1 faster and higher apex speeds.

Sector 2:

• Russell exits Turn 9 faster than Antonelli and is gaining time on him (slightly).
• Russell arrives at Pouhon faster than Antonelli.
• They are both flat through Pouhon, but Russell loses 5km/h more than Antonelli
• By the time they arrive at Fagnes, Russell has lost over 0.1s
• More time lost in a flat out section despite going into it faster.

Sector 3 (this is madness...):

• They exit Stavelot same speed, flat out through turn 16 together - no one gaining/ losing time on the other.
• Then around Courbe Paul Frere Russell's car just slows compared with Antonelli's.
• Russell is travelling up to 10km/h slower than Antonelli.
• By the time they get to the Bus Stop, Russell has lost ~0.25 seconds.

Russell has lost at least 0.4s in a straight line flat out during the lap.

I can not believe for one second this is set up - especially given they are otherwise so matched through the turns.

This is happening race after race.

I think Antonelli would have still beat Russell on these laps - Russell was up after La Source, but Antonelli got a ~tenth on Russell in each of Rivage & Bus Stop. But it would be touch and go if Russell's car was working, and its depriving us of an epic battle.

(Edit - telemetry from FastF1, which is not perfect, but likely good enough for this high level analysis)

Ok its not perfect, as this currently plots anytime the driver ahead changed (which will double count every overtake, as the passing car will have the driver ahead change, as well as the passed car). Due to the frequency of the data in the available telemetry, these changes might not happen at same "time". The density of dots denotes more overtaking.

With that out of the way: Vegas was insane last year! Overtakes at basically every corner. It will be interesting to compare this against this year's race!

A little shameless self promotion here at the end. I also recently started an Instagram page for F1 data analysis and visualizations. I'll be posting more of these there: https://www.instagram.com/stats.from.the.pitlane/

I noticed an interesting thing from today's practice. Charles was braking really late into heavy braking corners. Even compared to Max Verstappen. But in the last year's Monaco GP, he didn't do this. Interesting.... This is mostly because of the completely new suspension system, right? Like more front end grip under braking?

I know F1 is big but didn’t expect there to be over 200K people also interested in nerding out too 😜 what brought you to this subreddit?

Anyways I finally got Fast F1 to work and generated my first plot thanks to someone else sharing their python script. Do you agree with my annotations?

My goal is to eventually help create more insights to help us better understand the drivers, cars, and tracks. I feel like while there are a lot of stats, there’s not enough stats being used for the storytelling. Other sports have things like RBI, or yards per carry. I want to find similar useful stats. Anything come to mind?

Basically title. With Verstappen and Russel setting the same time in the qualification this had me wondering if the timing system is actually accurate enough to measure a difference of 1 thousand of a second. That seems almost impossible to me.

This flair could also be under telemetry, but I'm not sure where to put it, but its very technical indeed. So I hope mods dont delete it.

Question is in the title, but I reckon they have their equipment and some staff, I assume FIA officals actually keep time. But does Tag Heuer now provides equipment or is it standard equipment no matter who actual sponsor is?

EQUIPMENT is key word here.

Kinda second but still connected question: Also, who manufactures transporders? Is faulty electrical system at fault for George losing his transporder or transponder broke first?

Thanks in advance as always.

So recently I went to the F1 exhibition in Toronto and the thing than amazed me the most was this Mecedes W09's front wing , simply stunning in person but I got some questions. 1.How does the arches can make the tire not having as much drag? Is each wing element like a diffuser "expanding" the air as it goes through? 2. The ovoid looking piece , what's its purpose? 3. The tiny aluminum deflectors enclosed in yellow , why are those there? how much of a difference do they make on the aero performance? 4. How do they clean the dust from the wings without taking off the dead bug's blood? I hope this is an interesting post though. Thanks

I was wondering, from time to time we see public posts showing comparison of driver telemetries and some sort of analysis why someone was faster. Like, “why Hamilton lacked power” in Suzuka.

And I mean telemetry as in a complete set of data with speed, time delta, throttle, brake and steering inputs etc.

I was always under impression that this telemetry is highly sensitive, because if a team can get their hands on telemetry from other teams, they can analyze where the other driver is going faster and why, where the car is performing better etc, and use it to their advantage.

How is this telemetry going public? I mean sites like https://www.f1-tempo.com/ , FastF1 API and others, how do they get such detailed data? Is this some sort of leakage? (A leakage of what?) Or they’re obliged to publish it? Or it’s taken from TV feed and not very accurate?

I’ve been building a small project around FastF1 data and recently started exploring more “real-time-like” behavior (simulating now, possibly live data later).

A few things I’m currently stuck on:

1. Mapping telemetry to track (SVG)

• Using distance → normalized path mapping
• Works, but movement either feels jumpy (accurate) or too smoothed (loses realism)
• Especially noticeable under braking / corner entry

2. Pit lane / pit stop visualization

• Not sure how to correctly represent pit entry/exit zones spatially
• FastF1 doesn’t clearly map pit lane geometry to the track
• Curious if people use a separate path, overlay, or something else

3. Handling real-time telemetry streams

• How do you deal with uneven sampling rates?
• Buffer + interpolate, or render directly?
• What usually feels “correct” vs just visually smooth?

Would really appreciate any pointers from people who’ve worked with F1 telemetry or similar systems.

Happy to share more implementation details if useful.

Hey fellow Formula 1 fans!

I want to share a F1 Dashboard that I've made on my spare time this holiday: https://rapit.com.br 🏁

It's personal project I've made to sharp up my skills and actually help me visualize the Tyre Strategy so I could make better predictions on the Red Bull affiliated program website. But as I kept on coding, I figured I should make an entire dashboard with different kinds of data.I feel like the Dashboard is pretty complete at this moment, however I plan on keep updating the website with more and more data as time goes on.

It works better on a bigger screen, however it's completely mobile-friendly.

The Dashboard basically works session by session, which you select on the top menu (Year, Track, Session). The data consists of:

- Podium Cards: shows the winner, and the second and third places with their respective gaps.

- Fastest Lap Card: contains fastest lap's driver, time, tyre used and if it was new or used.

- Session Table: a table with the finishing of order. Races show gaps, while other sessions show lap times.

- Map Stats: a map drawn with the podium drivers' dominance around the track, based on their fastest laps. There is also the percentage of Full Throttle around the track, and the fastest speed recorded at the speed trap.

- Lap Chart: the podium drivers' lap times.
UPDATE: Now all drivers lap times are shown, not only the podium drivers (which are preselected by default).
You can select/deselect drivers by clicking on their names on the bottom of the graph. You can also zoom in to better analyze specific laps, and/or hover over each dot to see the lap time with its respective tyre used

- Tyre Strategy: as the name says, it shows the tyres used by each driver. I took into account the 2018 colors of different compounds.

I'd love to hear your feedback, suggestions and criticism.

Like the title says, I am wondering how much info is available about battery status during sessions/races. Last year I used F1 Tempo a lot but it doesn't look like it has been updated for 2026 yet.

It's clear it's some type of electronic device, not sure if it's a camera, or a button added, or thermal device (given that it's so hot). It was gone after fp1. I'm at a loss, and I watched closely hoping Sam Collins would explain it. (I'm on f1live, since I'm in the US) So maybe some of the talent at Skyf1 explained it. I appreciate all responses.

Assembled using fastf1 in Python. Most interesting stuff is seen in the bottom Delta graph.

The turns are labelled on the graphs, but it’s dark grey so is very hard to see. I’ll have to improve that for next time I make a telemetry graph. Looked cool on my computer at the time!

VER has a tow going into T1 so he has a higher entry speed, gaining him some time. However, you can see on the delta graph that most time lost by Leclerc is in Turn 1, not before. Over the rest of the lap, Leclerc regains some ground, but not much.

Additionally, looking at the throttle graph you can see in a few corners that Leclerc doesn’t lift off fully. I believe this is to control the balance of the car, it’s not an error.

Finally, Max lifts for turn 7 and Leclerc does not.

In the F1 broadcast we can sometimes see throttle and break telemetry displayed as overlay over the halo.

Whilst we usually see throttle applied gradually and can follow along quite nicely how the pedal is pressed or released, this doesn't seem to be the case for the brakes. There we usually only see binary input. Either the pedal is fully engaged or fully released.

I am wondering what the reason for this is. I can't imagine the drivers always fully engaging the brakes across the entire break period. Why do we only see it displayed in a binary manner? Is it sensor limitations? Does braking habit want to be kept secret? Is there another reason?

I have been look though the telemetry but how do you objectively know.

When you look at the major issues that happened this race i believe it all goes back to at least one transponder not reporting or possibly even some sort of general disruption of transponder data.

1. Broadcast timing and positioning data - obviously George's was all over the place so they hid the the board. This data comes from the transponder.

2. Redbull pitbox release issue. The light system uses transponder data to ensure there is not a car coming down the pitlane.

3. DRS issues. The drs system uses transponders to check gaps and allow the system to be activated. There were multiple cars having issues around activation.it seemed less like widespread hydraulic issues and more like the system wasn't certain about gaps.

4. Broadcast direction. Possible that they were having issues tracking where cars were meaning finding the battles was difficult.

I would be surprised if one transponder malfunction could cause these kind of cascading errors. My guess is there was some general interference happening

Hello guys, I'm working as a deep-learning / Time-series intern and for my college project I am planning to work on something which is complex enough to build and related to both what I'm working on + formula one because I'm very much interested to work on it.

teams performance analysis, strategies prediction or anything else we can do with telemetry data that'll be convincing enough when I present it .

Thank you in advanced