F1 Timing Screen as a Spreadsheet?

One of the comment themes I’ve noticed around the first Challenge in the Tata F1 Connectivity Innovation Prize, a challenge to rethink what’s possible around the timing screen given only the data in the real time timing feed, is that the non-programmers don’t get to play. I don’t think that’s true – the challenge seems to be open to ideas as well as practical demonstrations, but it got me thinking about what technical ways in might be to non-programmers who wouldn’t know where to start when it came to working with the timing stream messages.

The answer is surely the timing screen itself… One of the issues I still haven’t fully resolved is a proven way of getting useful information events from the timing feed – it updates the timing screen on a cell by cell basis, so we have to finesse the way we associate new laptimes or sector times with a particular driver, bearing in mind cells update one at a time, in a potentially arbitrary order, and with potentially different timestamps.

So how about if we work with a “live information model” by creating a copy of an example timing screen in a spreadsheet. If we know how, we might be able to parse the real data stream to directly update the appropriate cells, but that’s largely by the by. At least we have something we can work work to start playing with the timing screen in terms of a literal reimagining of it. So what can we do if we put the data from an example timing screen into a spreadsheet?

If we create a new worksheet, we can reference the cells in the “original” timing sheet and pull values over. The timing feed updates cells on a cell by cell basis, but spreadsheets are really good at rippling through changes from one or more cells which are themselves reference by one or more others.

The first thing we might do is just transform the shape of the timing screen. For example, we can take the cells in a column relating to sector 1 times and put them into a row.

The second thing we might do is start to think about some sums. For example, we might find the difference between each of those sector times and (for practice and qualifying sessions at least) the best sector time recorded in that session.

The third thing we might do is to use a calculated value as the basis for a custom cell format that colours the cell according to the delta from the best session time.

Simple, but a start.

I’ve not really tried to push this idea very far – I’m not much of a spreadsheet jockey – but I’d be interested to know how folk who are might be able to push this idea…

If you need example data, there’s some on the F1 site – f1.com – results for Spanish Grand Prix, 2014 and more on Ergast Developer API.

PS FWIW, my entry to the competition is here: #f1datajunkie challenge 1 entry. It’s perhaps a little off-brief, but I’ve been meaning to do this sort of summary for some time, and this was a good starting point. If I get a chance, I’ll have a go a getting the parsers to work properly properly!