Official F1 Telemetry stream: livetiming.formula1.com

[peterkilroy]

Hi there,
Really impressive work. Looking forward to v2.2.
I was wondering where one finds further details of the official telemetry stream: livetiming.formula1.com?
I have drawn a bit of a blank and I would like to understand; e.g. How soon after each race is the telemetry updated? Are there any details on the format of the json and json streams?
Thanks for any guidance,
Peter

[theOehrly]

There is absolutely no information available that I know of. FastF1s code, the comments within it and the documentation is likely the best you will find in terms of information about the api.

The data is usually available about 30 minutes after a session. But that's just from experience.

If you have any specific questions, feel free to ask.

[theOehrly]

Hi, sorry, completely forgot to answer. If you want to use live timing/telemetry data visualization in the official f1 app, then you need a subscription. The actual API itself does not require authentication. Therefore, FastF1 does currently not require a subscription.

[luca-bertero]

Hi, sorry for the question, but i was wondering why the fast-f1 api doesn't need a subscription for getting the data from livetiming.formula1.com and how it get it.

[theOehrly]

The server doesn't ask for authentication, so it's not even possible for FastF1 to authenticate users...

[EnzoPlayer0ne]

@theOehrly Hey, first, congratulations on the whole project. It is now quick and easy to analyse F1 data! On top of this, your comments are super helpful.
I was curious how you reversed the API for 'https://livetiming.formula1.com' if they are no information about it online?
Also, did you ever have issues with the rate-limiting? For instance, Ergast has a limit of 200 requests per hour. Is there an equivalent for livetimingF1?
Thanks again for the whole project!

[theOehrly]

@EnzoPlayer0ne I've never had issues with rate limiting. I don't know if it exists on that API. Usually, I have the caching enabled and that will reduce the number of requests a lot. But even when I had caching disabled, I've never had any problems. If you use FastF1 "reasonably", I'm pretty sure, you won't have any issues.
For finding out, how the API works, there's a few things you can do and then there's plenty of trial and error and guessing for the parsing of the data especially.