Fast-F1

New Features

• Added support for Numpy v2.0.

• Completely reimplemented the fastf1.plotting module. The new module
  provides a more flexible and powerful API for creating custom plots. This
  is an overview of the relevant new features and changes:

  • Driver and team names, abbreviations and colors are now supported for
    all seasons since 2018 instead of only for the most recent season.

  • Driver changes and test drivers running in free practice session are now
    supported automatically and do no longer require an update of FastF1.

  • Users can now choose between the "offcial" F1 color map and the color map
    that was already used previously by FastF1.

  • Driver specific colors are deprecated. Users are encouraged to use more
    visually distinct plot styling options instead to differentiate between
    drivers of the same team. The new
    fastf1.plotting.get_driver_style function can be used to easily
    get driver specific styling options.

  • Users can override team colors and short name constants on a per-session
    basis.

  • The API has been improved to be more consistent and easier to use.

• Added support for a fallback mirror for the F1 livetiming API. If the primary
  API is unavailable, FastF1 will automatically switch to the fallback mirror
  and continue to work without any user intervention.
  This feature is experimental and for now provided without any guarantees.

• Added a warning that informs users when event, driver or team names are
  fuzzy matched. (by @Casper-Guo) (#574)

• Improved fuzzy matching of event names to give better matching results. (by
  @Casper-Guo) (#579)

• The SignalRClient can now be started when an async event loop is already
  running by awaiting the new
  fastf1.livetiming.client.SignalRClient.async_start coroutine. This
  enables usage in newer versions of Juypter Notebooks, for example.

• Set a default connection timeout of five seconds for all requests to the
  Ergast API. This should prevent long data loading times when the API is
  unresponsive.

Bug Fixes

• Drivers that crashed on the very first lap are now assigned NaN as their
  position, ensuring correct positions throughout the field at then end of the
  first lap. (by @AND2797) (#595)

• Fixed a bug that prevented loading of any data when driver information was
  unavailable from the F1 livetiming API.

• Fixed a bug in the client side rate limiting that allowed higher rates than
  intended. This may have caused the client to be temporarily blocked by the
  server.

Deprecations

• The following module level properties of :mod:fastf1.plotting have been
  deprecated:
  fastf1.plotting.COMPOUND_COLORS,
  fastf1.plotting.DRIVER_COLORS,
  fastf1.plotting.DRIVER_TRANSLATE,
  fastf1.plotting.TEAM_COLORS,
  fastf1.plotting.TEAM_TRANSLATE,
  fastf1.plotting.COLOR_PALETTE

• The following functions in :mod:fastf1.plotting have been deprecated:
  fastf1.plotting.driver_color,
  fastf1.plotting.team_color,
  fastf1.plotting.lapnumber_axis

• The argument misc_mpl_mods of function fastf1.plotting.setup_mpl
  is deprecated and will be removed in the future without replacement for its
  functionality.

• The argument color_scheme of function fastf1.plotting.setup_mpl
  will default to None in the future, meaning that FastF1's default color
  scheme will need to be enabled explicitly.

Increased minimum versions for dependencies

• The new minimum version of Python is 3.9. Support for Python 3.8 is dropped.

• The minimum versions for the following dependencies have been increased:

  • numpy to >=1.23.1
  • scipy to >=1.8.1

Second alpha pre-release for reimplemented plotting submodule.

Discussion in https://github.com/theOehrly/Fast-F1/pull/585

New Features

• Added support for driver Franco Colapinto (COL) (by @grahamjwhite) (#609)

Bug Fixes

• Resolved an issue where the majority of data was missing from the 2024
  Sprint Qualifying session results (fixes #597).

Bug Fixes

• Fixed a bug that caused the timing data for the first lap of the Monaco GP 2024 to be missing entirely (fixes #594)

Bug Fixes

• Laps where a driver crashes and retires on track now contain a correct
  track status (fixes #575)

• Fixed previously incorrect circuit info for Mugello 2020 (fixes #563)

Others

• Improved a warning message that informs about missing data when calculating
  qualification results

Alpha pre-release for reimplemented plotting submodule.

Discussion in #585

Bug Fixes

• Fixed an issue that causes no result data to be available for 'Sprint Qualifying' sessions

• Correctly handle reinstated lap times after they were previously deleted

Bug Fixes

• Correctly support the new "Sprint Qualifying" (#570)

New Features

• Added support for driver Ayumu Iwasa (IWA)

Bug Fixes

• Fixed a bug that caused the track status values for each lap to be sometimes incorrect in the 'TrackStatus' column of the Laps DataFrame (fixes #557 and more).

Bug Fixes

• Fix: correctly handle empty strings when parsing them in fastf1.utils.to_datetime (by @erdieee) (#531)

• Fix: gracefully handle empty strings when parsing datetime values in Ergast responses (by @mdsakalu) (#546). This fixes partially missing data in the results Qualifying and Race results for the 2024 Saudi Arabia GP.

New Features

• Updated team names and team colors for the 2024 season. (As usual, this means
  that this information is no longer valid for the previous season! see note below)

• Improved the accuracy of fastf1.utils.delta_time (by @grahamjwhite)
  (#512)

Note: The update of the team names and team colors for the 2024 season means that you may no longer be able to visualize data from 2023 correctly. This is a long-standing issue that will most likely be resolved with the next minor release in a few months.

Bug Fixes

• Fixed another bug that caused fastf1.core.Session.get_circuit_info
  to fail only in some cases if the default resampling frequency for
  telemetry data is changed (#455)

Bug Fixes

• Fixed a bug that caused timestamps of telemetry data to have (apparent)
  microseconds precision (even though this is not the case). As a result,
  merging position data and car data did not have a well matching timestamp
  index resulting in additional interpolated values. This problem only occurred
  in combination with recent versions of Pandas.

Other

• Various changes to address deprecations in Pandas.

New Features

• Added support for Pandas version v2.1.0 and higher.

• Methods fastf1.core.Lap.get_telemetry and
  fastf1.core.Laps.get_telemetry now take an optional additional
  frequency keyword argument to override the default frequency that is
  used for resampling.

• Added fastf1.core.Laps.pick_box_laps to select inlaps and outlaps
  (#454) (by @pesaventofilippo)

• Added the lap number to race control messages, see
  fastf1.core.Session.race_control_messages (#475) (by @manpean)

• Improved lap data integrity checks (#449) (by @d-tomasino)

• Added a string representation for the Cache class that gives information
  about the cache path and the cache size

• Added the function fastf1.Cache.get_cache_info that returns
  information about the cache path and the cache size

Bug Fixes

• Fixed incorrect lap number (zero instead of one) for generated laps that are
  added when a driver crashes on the very first lap

• Fixed fastf1.core.Session.get_circuit_info fails if the default
  resampling frequency for telemetry data is changed (#455)

• Fixed multiple issues with the Ergast API interface that resulted in
  invalid request being made and consequentially no data being returned
  (#489, #494) (by @Lombardoc4)

• Fixed missing driver information for drivers that did not start in a race
  (classified as DNS - did not start) (#447)

• Fixed a regression introduced in v3.1.3 that caused the CountryCode
  to be missing from fastf1.core.SessionResults

• Fixed a compatibility issued with Pandas v1.3.5

New Features

• Added driver colors for OWA, DEN and OSU

Bug Fixes

• Fixed a bug that caused inconsistent behaviour in
  fastf1.core.Laps.pick_fastest in some cases were there was no lap
  that met the criteria for a fastest lap. Now, an empty
  fastf1.core.Lap object will always be returned when there is no
  fastest lap. (Note that this will change in the future, see 'Deprecations'
  below (#476) (by @Casper-Guo)

• Fixed a bug that prevented some sessions of the Las Vegas Grand Prix from
  being loaded (#481)

Bug Fixes

• Fixed a bug that caused fastf1.core.Telemetry.add_driver_ahead to
  only work with telemetry data that matches the sampling timebase of the
  car data (#430)

• Improved robustness of the Ergast API parser to prevent crashes caused by some
  empty values in the API response (#433) (by @harningle)

• Fixed: some laps that were generated by FastF1 had incorrect lap numbers

• Fixed: pit out times from the lap onto the grid are no longer shown for the
  first lap of a race-like session. The first lap will only have a pit out time
  if a driver started from the pit lane or pitted on the formation lap.
  (#467) (by @Casper-Guo)

• Improved robustness of the 'f1timing' schedule backend to prevent a crash
  caused by partially incorrect data for the schedule of the Qatar GP

• Fixed: laps for all drivers were marked as inaccurate if the lap accuracy
  check could not be performed for one driver

New Features

• Added driver colors for VES, POU, HAD, DOO and BEA
  (#471) (by @pesaventofilippo)

Bug Fixes

• fixed a bug in the driver list parser that caused Piastri to be missing from
  the results in the 2023 Qatar Sprint Shootout (#460)