Motorsport Stats — A Comprehensive Free Source of Motor Racing Sports Results?

In passing, I note the launch of Motorsport Stats, “the sport’s pre-eminent provider of motorsport results, live data and and visualised racing analytics for media owners, rights-holders, bookmakers and broadcasters”, apparently… It looks like it’s free, but I’m not sure what the license terms are yet…

A part of Autosport Media, it looks as if it wraps several motorsport results databases, including Forix.

F1 stats looks like a scrape of the FIA timing sheets:

and whilst there are some graphics, I’ve no idea how you find them other than by luck…

The WRC Results go back a good for years, but the presentation is limited to stage / overall classifications presented in a not totally useful way to my mind:

By way of reference, here’s how I’m currently looking at stage results:

and overall classification:

Part of the business model seems to be selling things like widget displays. For example, here’s some marketing blurb from last year for the  Motorsport Stats Formula One widget suite.

They’re also into the production of dataviz products, from social media infographics to video graphics using Vizrt.

Hmmm… thinks… it’s been ages since I did any TV sports graphics round-ups… looks to be at least a couple of years going by these examples: Augmented TV Sports Coverage & Live TV Graphics and Behind the Scenes of Sports Broadcasting – Virtual Sets, VIrtual Signage and Virtual Advertising, etc.

I’ve seen a couple of mentions in reports about an API, but haven’t found any docs around that yet. A peak at browser developer tools suggests JSON API calls, which is handy:

It shouldn’t be too much of a chore (?!) to create a wrapper around the API if it plays nice and uses structured URLs with obvious ways of picking out record IDs / keys out of the JSON to use with the structured URLs:

If you’ve spotted docs for the API, found a Python wrapper for it, or even created your own, please let me know:-)

PS I keep meaning to get restarted with my Wrangling F1 Data With R book, or perhaps in a “More Data Wrangling…” version, or perhaps “…With Python”. But there never seems to be enough hours in the day…