Pit Wall Engineer
Watch F1 like an engineer, not like a spectator.
pitwallengineer.com · Docs: free, PRO and live mode · Leer en español
What it is
Pit Wall Engineer turns raw Formula 1 timing data into the analysis a race engineer would run: true pace, tyre degradation, pit impact, race phases, chaos, weather crossovers and lap telemetry.
During a session, Live mode puts the same lens on the feed as it arrives: timing, track map, car data, tyres, strategy, race control and team radio.
Every number carries its confidence and the size of the sample behind it. A reading that cannot be judged yet is labelled as such, never rounded into certainty.
Product principle: confidence and sample size
A ranking built on four laps is not a ranking built on forty. The product treats that as a design rule, not a footnote.
- Pace results show how many clean laps they rest on and carry a confidence level derived from that count.
- Excluded laps are logged with the reason, so every ranking can be audited.
- Weather crossovers that overlap a safety car are flagged and downgraded, not credited to tyre choice alone.
- In Live mode, the Chaos Index is shown as a density over the laps run so far, with its caveat; the final index only exists after the chequered flag.
- Pit window signals are measurements with a confidence and a stated basis, never a predicted stop lap.
- A value the data cannot support is hidden and the page says why, rather than shown wrong: lateral g from FastF1 laps is withheld until its calculation is fixed.
Modules and the question each one answers
| Module | Strategic question |
|---|
| True Pace | Who was actually fast once pit laps, safety car laps and outliers are removed? |
| Tyre degradation | Where did each stint start to fall off, and how steep was it? |
| Pit impact | Did the stop gain or lose positions, and was the undercut real? |
| Race phases | What was the race doing on each lap: sorting, pit window, safety car reset, final push? |
| Chaos Index | How disordered was the race, and on which lap did it peak? |
| DRS trains | When were cars stuck in a group, and for how long? |
| Weather crossovers | Who was early, on time or late when the track changed? |
| Clean air value | What was running free worth against running in traffic? |
| Lap charts | How did lap times and gaps evolve, lap by lap? |
| Telemetry replay | How did the drivers differ through speed, throttle, brake, gear and g on one lap? |
| Race control and radio | What did the stewards and the pit wall say, and when? |
| Recon Lap | What does this circuit ask of a car: where are the braking zones, how much speed is lost, in which gear, over how much height? |
| AI race engineer | What does this specific race say about a question I have? |
Live mode
A session view with eight tabs: Timing, Track & car, Strategy, Predictions (only when the live server sends a projection), Race control & radio, Lap charts, Engineer AI and Feed.
- Timing: order, gaps and sectors, session records and weather.
- Track & car: a track map drawn from the session's first clean lap, every car's position, and the selected car's speed, gear, RPM, throttle, brake and DRS state.
- Strategy: clean pace so far, the pit watch (long runs in practice), pit lane times, tyre stints and compounds, overtakes.
- Race control & radio: flags, incidents and safety car messages, team radio, and the engineer's notes with the chaos density so far. Radio clips are linked from the official archive, never copied or stored here.
Practice and qualifying sessions get their own profile: best laps, sector colours, long runs and session status.
Lap telemetry
The telemetry tab replays one lap per driver, fastest clean or representative, with speed, throttle, brake, gear and g forces against the circuit map.
- Source: OpenF1 car data placed on the location trace, one file per race and lap mode with the whole field, distance scaled to the official lap length. The files are served as gzip JSON from Cloudflare R2.
- Fallback: a race that is not on R2 is served by the API from its FastF1 cache, exactly as before. A badge in the tab names the source, OpenF1 or FastF1.
- Lateral g: shown for OpenF1 laps; withheld on FastF1 laps until their calculation is fixed, with the reason on screen.
Recon Lap
/recon/<circuit> previews a circuit before its Grand Prix from the previous season's pole lap: the line the car took in 3D with its recorded height, as a tour of its braking zones, one at a time. The arrow keys or the buttons move to the previous or next zone with the camera still on it, and a panel shows what the lap's car data measured there: entry speed, minimum speed, braking distance, time on the brakes, gear at the minimum and height change. It is labelled approximate, with the data's sampling rate and the reference session. The whole lap plays only when asked, never by itself. A minimap and a height profile show where the zone sits.
This is the beginning of the README. Read the rest at the original. Read the full README ↗
