About FanDebrief
FanDebrief is a Formula 1 publication built on timing data. Every article starts from the same place: the lap times, sector splits, tyre stints and telemetry traces that a race session actually produced, read for what they argue rather than summarised.
Most F1 data on the internet lives inside interactive charts. They are useful if you already know what you are looking for. If you want to know why a driver lost a race he looked like winning, they hand you a filter and wish you luck. FanDebrief answers the question instead, and shows the numbers it used.
Where the numbers come from
Timing and telemetry are sourced through FastF1, which reads Formula 1's publicly available live timing feed, and results data through the Ergast-compatible jolpica-f1 API. That covers lap and sector times, positions, tyre compounds and stint lengths, speed traps, and car data at roughly 10Hz: speed, throttle, brake, gear, DRS and GPS position.
That is a fraction of what a team sees on its own pitwall, and it contains no insider access of any kind. Where an article makes a claim, the claim rests on that public data, and the charts show the same numbers the article is arguing from.
How the articles are made
FanDebrief is automated. A session ends, the data is pulled, the analysis runs, and a language model writes the article under the FanDebrief byline. There is no reporter in the paddock and no press pass, and pretending otherwise on a site about honest numbers would be a strange place to start lying.
What that automation is not allowed to do matters more than the fact of it. Before anything is published, a set of deterministic checks reads the finished article back against the session's own data: the winner, the session type, the weather, the classification. An article that contradicts the data it was written from is blocked rather than corrected. Not every session produces an article, either. If the data has no argument in it, there is nothing worth publishing, and nothing is.
Articles are occasionally informed by published race coverage for context, but every number in them comes from the timing data, not from another publication's reporting.
What you can expect it to get wrong
Telemetry describes what a car did, not what a driver or an engineer was thinking. An article can show that a strategy cost a driver two positions; it cannot tell you what was said on the pitwall before the call. Where FanDebrief reaches a conclusion about intent, it is an argument from evidence, and you are welcome to disagree with it.
If something here is wrong, it is worth knowing about. Corrections are made to the article itself.
Who is behind it
FanDebrief is published by Indy Gill, who built the pipeline behind it and is responsible for what it publishes. He has spent twenty years designing, building and growing online businesses for other people, and now builds them for himself: businesses meant to last rather than to trend.
FanDebrief is one of those, and it is also the question that started it. How much of a publication can data and automation actually carry, when the work still has to be right every time? The archive is the answer, one race at a time.
The site is independent: not affiliated with any team, driver, or governing body, and nobody pays for coverage.
FanDebrief is unofficial and is not associated in any way with the Formula 1 companies. F1, FORMULA ONE, FORMULA 1, FIA FORMULA ONE WORLD CHAMPIONSHIP, GRAND PRIX and related marks are trade marks of Formula One Licensing B.V.