Recently, my friends and I visited an F1 Grand Prix in Spa. Before I knew I was going to the race, I wasn't a fan of F1 at all. But once I found out, I decided to prepare and understand what was actually going on there. Luckily, Netflix made the entry point pretty accessible — they released the Drive to Survive series. I also watched the F1 movie (also good ⭐️).
The more you learn about F1, the more you realize it’s not just about the race — it’s about team effort, technology, and money. The best driver doesn’t always win; it's often the best car paired with a high-profile driver.
Watching F1 live is exciting, but feels a lot like whoosh whoosh whoosh — cars fly past you, and all you can do is keep turning your head like crazy. Last week, I watched the Hungarian Grand Prix on TV, and the experience was very different. Not just because you can see the whole race, but because of all the additional information shown on the screen to make it more engaging (for example, radio exchanges between drivers and their teams).
❓And I asked myself — is this information public? There’s no real reason for it not to be. If the FIA (the organization behind F1) makes it public, it enables others to build tools around it and ultimately make F1 more popular.
Turns out, this data is available. I wasn’t able to find an official API, but there are several public ones. For example: https://openf1.org/. You can even query all public radio exchanges between
Lando Norris and his team during the Belgium event:https://api.openf1.org/v1/team_radio?driver_number=4&meeting_key=1265 .
It’s awesome that the data is public and people can build cool stuff around it.
I decided to run a quick experiment and, together with my friend AI agent, drafted a page (source) that lists radio exchanges per driver for the latest event:
https://f1-radio.onrender.com/ (works if the upstream API is responsive).
Looks cool, doesn't it?