r/F1Technical

noticed this on the ferrari’s onboard, i thought maybe it was to create a bit of flow separation and induce more/less drag on the rear wing, but does anybody know the actual reason?

F1 telemetry data is publicly available, but turning raw traces into something meaningful isn’t straightforward. What does a speed trace actually tell you? Where exactly did a driver lose time, and why?

I built a tool to answer those questions clearly, corner by corner, in plain English, with the delta attached.

How it works

Data comes directly from the official F1 live timing feed at ~3.7Hz speed, throttle, brake, gear, DRS, and car position. The lap events breakdown is where the interesting engineering happens.

A few things the raw feed doesn’t give you that I had to approximate:

Racing lines — no reference geometry exists publicly, so I derive them from the fastest laps of each session. Good enough for cornering analysis but understeer detection isn’t comprehensive as a result.

Braking zones — not in the data directly. I approximate markers from reference laps, which I think is actually a reasonable approach since it gives you a driver-relative baseline rather than an arbitrary fixed point.

Wheel spin — approximated from RPM spikes without corresponding acceleration. Works well for obvious cases, less reliable for subtle ones.

Being upfront: some detections are estimates. But the goal is meaningful signal, not false precision.

Here’s a qualifying example

Happy to go deeper on any of it. Feedback welcome.

Bit of a nebulous question, so sorry.

Williams were rumored to be around 30kg overweight. Vowels has been pretty clear about the diet plan, but I would like some clarification on how it works in practice.

The team has been pretty clear about shedding a couple of kilograms each race, but in the recent Williams F1 Youtube video JV mentioned that it wouldn't be around August until the team was where they want to be at, which I read to mean: It won't be until August when they have shed all the weight.

So is it simply a manufacturing issue? If they have the plan, they know what to do and how to do it, its simply waiting for the lighter parts to be manufactured?

Is the cost cap that is the cause for this?

Could they reprint all parts at current spec but lighter, but because of the cost cap, they are just waiting for their updated parts to come in instead?

Is that not effectively booting the season?