r/formulaone

Hey gang,

I built a web app to make race weekends a lot more competitive. You can log in, lock in your picks, and compete for bragging rights while gaining badges. It's completely free and locks in your picks before the sessions start, using a live API to automatically score your accuracy and update the leader boards.

We offer full-grid sprint and race picks, podium-only mode if you want to keep it simple, and prop picks for that extra chaos. The app also generates a clean graphic of your grid, like the one attached to this post, so you can easily share your strategy.

Get on there, and see if you can actually beat your friends this weekend. Let me know what you think of the setup, and feel free to DM me with any feedback you might have! Hope you enjoy it!

Each horizontal strip is one driver's whole season so far. Each pixel in that strip is a single racing lap, coloured by how that lap was run:

🟣 their fastest lap of the race · 🟢 strong lap (near their own best pace) · 🔵 normal racing lap · 🟡 off-pace lap · ⚫ pit in/out lap · ⚪ neutralised (Safety Car / VSC) · 🔴 retired

Drivers are ordered top-to-bottom by raw race pace, so you can read the whole grid at a glance — the front-runners carry far more green, and you can spot exactly where someone's race unravelled (the red).

On the methodology, because someone will (rightly) ask: every single category is derived from real lap timing data. The one thing I deliberately refused to do was guess intent. A slow lap is just labelled "off-pace" — I don't dress it up as "tyre management" or "traffic," because that's not in the data and I'd only be guessing. "Retired" comes from the official classification, not me eyeballing where the laps stop. "Neutralised" is detected from the whole field slowing at once, not assumed. I'd rather it be something you can trust than something that looks clever but invents detail.

It's pulled from public timing data and rendered with a tool I've been building. ~9,900 laps in this one image.

If this is interesting, what would you want mapped next — a single driver's entire career this way? Two title rivals' seasons side by side? Open to ideas.

The picture is from a test on Friday, 3rd July 1987, in preparation for the Esso MG Metro Challenge Race at Silverstone on 11th July.

A picture of Damon Hill testing the Metro is in the Autosport issue of 9th July which reported he would be racing the car at the British GP support race for Gray-Woolf Racing alongside teammates Michael Cullen, Barbara Cowell and Chris Taylor.

Hill is not mentioned in the report of the race in the Autosport issue dated 16th July, and the results only show the top ten finishers, so he would have had to have finished 11th at the highest, unless he retired. There were 38 starters, so he could have had an anonymous race in the midfield.

In this race, the celebrity cars were driven by David Sears and Mark Hales, though the Autosport 1987 British GP supplement suggested Johnny Dumfries was going to be driving one of the celebrity cars.

Damon's #16 car was usually driven by Featherweight boxer Barry McGuigan, which suggests he stood in for McGuigan, following the recent passing of McGuigan's father Patrick, though I have yet to find any sources to support this.

The car was his late father Graham's team's intended entry for the 1976 season.