Finished Drive to Survive and got hooked on F1 races for a while. The problem is that drivers change teams faster than I can remember who drives where. And the teams change names too.
Honda → Brawn → Mercedes. Renault → Lotus → Renault → Alpine.
The table
It started as one table in plain HTML: years top to bottom, teams left to right, drivers in the cells. Just to finally see who moved where, and when.
Then I got a chance to try Lovable. Moved the table there, and it gave me a good base and ideas for pages I hadn’t even thought about at first. I kept the table anyway.
Team lineage
To keep track of how drivers moved between teams, each column is one team through all of its names, and under the driver’s name small print says what the team was called that season. That way you see straight away that Force India, Racing Point and Aston Martin are the same outfit.
Mercedes, Aston Martin and Alpine, 2026 back to 2008
Then it got out of hand. A few more weekends - and there were driver and team pages. Later a home page with the latest race and championship leaders, career comparisons, and the grid going back to the first world championship in 1950.
What’s in there now
- Every season since 1950 and every race in it: results, qualifying, sprints, and lap charts from 1996 on.
- 78 circuits with a drawing of the layout, who wins there most, and every race ever held on it.
- Notable facts on driver, team and circuit pages. Each one is checked against Wikipedia before it goes live, because a confident wrong fact is worse than none.
- Notes next to the weird numbers: shared cars, dropped scores, half points. F1 scoring history is a mess, and now at least the mess is explained.
- A race page goes up before the weekend, with the session times in your own time zone. The standings show when the title is decided.
- Results on the home page right after a session, and the archive refreshes itself every Monday.
- Car numbers and grand slams (pole, win, fastest lap, every lap led), for the nerds. I’m the nerds.
- A Ukrainian version, with driver names in Cyrillic. Search finds Шумахер too.
AI race
Meanwhile new LLM models overtook Lovable. Now I do all the magic and new features outside of it. Lovable as a tool isn’t really my thing, and the CLI is all I need.
Most of the time went into the boring stuff: a data model that doesn’t break every time a team renames itself again, and tests. The tests immediately found holes in the data I had not noticed. One cross-check against 26 thousand race results found 292 wrong numbers in the hand-typed season tables. Occupational hazard. Now there are over two thousand tests, and the phone version went from a Lighthouse score of 52 to the 90s.
The data comes from the Jolpica F1 API, with OpenF1 for the fresh results and F1DB for the circuit drawings.