Hi all,
Long story short, or as they say, TL;DR: I've created a F1 stats site, focused on race laps and timings, which is sort of an hommage to the old AtlasF1 website stats. No account, no paywall, no ads. You can visit it here: F1 Lap Times & Gap Chart
And now for the "long story long"…
Origins
I've been following F1 since the late nineties, most intensely from around 2000 to 2014 or so. As it usually happens, my favourite era is the one when I started watching, so more or less the 1997-2001 period, so to speak. I also like history and research, so you won't be surprised to read that I'm a hardcore fan of the BBV10s podcast.
As such, during the years I've come across much archived material from the old AtlasF1 website, which existed from 1995 until 2005, when it was merged into Autosport. Most of it can be surfed here: ATLAS F1 Archive and Search: 1995-1998 Magazine
However, it wasn't until a couple of years ago that I found, by complete chance, the laps and times summary that they used to publish after the races, and I was absolutely stunned. To give you a taste of what I mean, because I guess most people here wouldn't have been around either, see the ones from the classic 1999 European GP:
Atlas F1 Magazine: 1999 European GP Lap Times Analysis (H)
Atlas F1 Magazine: 1999 European GP Lap Times Analysis (V)
Atlas F1 Magazine: 1999 European GP Lap Chart (Gaps)
There you have every single race lap time, for every driver, with the option to pick the ones you like to see (it still works!), and what surprised me the most, a gap chart which shows actual gaps to the leader, in minutes and seconds, even for drivers that had already been lapped. Many years ago, while I was subscribed to FORIX, I did some research on this particular race, mostly because I wanted to understand how on Earth did Badoer manage to jump to 4th. FORIX has full classifications by lap, with total race time for every driver, but even them don't have this level of detail; if I had known about the old Atlas pages, it would have made my life far easier.
As I've already said, I was absolutely stunned: somehow, back in the mid and late nineties, they had access to this level of detail and published it in structured format, for free. (The "for free" part doesn't really surprise me, because back then everything online was for free). I'm pretty sure (but, as Murray would say, could very well be mistaken) this is not available anywhere on the net for recent years and races; certainly, not for free.
Then, someone on the GP Rejects forum pointed me that the FIA does publish comparable material since some point at the 2012 season (F1 ARCHIVES | Federation Internationale de l'Automobile). I had a look at it, and it was interesting, but also kind of proved my point:. first of all, they are documents in PDF format. And then, lapped drivers are shown as "1 LAP" in the standings for that lap. I thought that, with this info, you could create the kind of chart that Atlas F1 did, because they also provide full lap times for each driver, but it would be quite a bit of work.
Well… the time and chance to do that bit of work has come, and this is the result: F1 Lap Times & Gap Chart
By the way: I wanted to publish this in the Autosport forums, where I have an account and there are a lot of old-timers that will surely remember Atlas fondly; alas, I lost access to my account (user: Ferrim, some 1,600 posts since October '07) and, although I've been trying to get in touch with moderation for a month, all my attempts have failed. If someone around here could help with that, it would be greatly appreciated.
I started building the site as a tribute, and as such, most of the site's conventions come from Atlas F1: the row-per-lap gap chart, the bold-for-fastest-lap styling, the general no-nonsense table-first approach to lap data. Everything is free, ad-free, and needs no account, with every number coming straight from the FIA's own timing documents: no third-party API, no manually copied spreadsheet.
It started as a personal hobby project, and has grown season by season since. I wouldn't have been able to built it without the help of generative AI, in this case Anthropic's, as a pair-programming partner: I set the direction and verify every number against the source PDFs, the AI writes and maintains the extraction pipeline.
Features
Three views per race:
- Lap Times:
the full grid, every driver against every lap
- Lap Rankings:
- Gap Chart:
On top of that:
- Lap-time comparison chart: click a driver's name to add them to a comparison graph; click again to remove them. Each driver gets a color tied to their team (the team's base color plus a lighter variant for the second driver), so you can tell at a glance who's who even with several drivers overlaid.
- Safety Car, Virtual Safety Car, red flag and formation lap tracking: affected laps are color-coded across every table and the comparison chart, sourced from the FIA's own race control messages where published, with a fallback source for seasons where they aren't.
the infamous VSC lap of the Madring, highlighted on brown
- Trilingual interface: Spanish, English and French, switchable instantly, no page duplication.
- Light and dark theme, following your system preference with a manual override.
- Placeholder pages for upcoming races, so there's something useful to look at before a race weekend's data exists:
track info, history, past winners, lap record
and the current championship standings
- Full driver and team roster per race, including mid-season driver changes, with flags and car numbers.
- Direct links to the original FIA PDFs and the official event page on every race:
So, you can always check the source yourself
- Filterable full lap ranking table for finding a specific driver's laps fast:
- No account, no paywall, no ads. The site runs Google Analytics for basic aggregate stats (page views, popular pages), gated behind an opt-in consent banner — nothing loads until you accept, and you can decline entirely.
Every lap time, gap, and finishing position is auto-extracted from the FIA's official PDFs and cross-checked against the FIA's own classification document before anything gets published. Where the FIA document shows a time penalty, that driver's gap is automatically excluded from the check instead of silently comparing against a number that no longer reflects real pace.
What's available now, and what's coming
Live and updated after every race weekend: the 2022 to 2026 seasons.
In progress: earlier seasons are being built and will be published in batches as they're finished and checked. I won't commit to exact dates here, but it's an active, ongoing effort, not an abandoned one.
This is a hobby project and I'd genuinely like it to be useful, so tell me what's missing. Wrong number, confusing page, a season or feature you want to see prioritized: all of it is welcome. Reply here, or open an issue on the GitHub repo if you prefer.
If you want to support the project directly, there's also a GitHub Sponsors page linked from the site, but feedback and bug reports are worth just as much to me as sponsorship.
Thanks!
Source: r/formula1data · by /u/fermanpre