How This Site Works

Pitbrain is a one-person operation built on top of automated data pipelines and a small set of AI tools. This page lays out exactly how the games are scored, where the data comes from, and what the AI does (and doesn’t do).

Where the F1 data comes from

Every standings table, calendar entry, and race result on the site is pulled from one of two free public APIs:

• OpenF1 — live timing, lap data, tyre strategy, and per-session telemetry for Paddock Live.
• Jolpi/Ergast — historical career stats (wins, podiums, poles, fastest laps, championships) used by the AI Pitwall and the head-to-head pages.

I write nothing about results until the official FIA timing is published. Game scores are computed against the official classification, not provisional.

Predictions & scoring

Race and Quali predictions lock when the relevant session starts. After the session ends and FIA results are official, the scoring job runs automatically and pushes points into the leaderboard. If a position later changes (penalty, post-race investigation), the score is recomputed.

Fantasy

The fantasy game runs on a $100M budget with five drivers and a constructor. Prices update weekly based on form. After each race, points are calculated, posted, and visible on every team page. Boosters are one-shot, season-long.

The AI tools

AI Pitwall answers F1 questions on the homepage. Most factual questions (standings, last race, career stats, head-to-head) are answered straight from the database in under 300ms with no LLM in the loop. Anything more open-ended falls back to Claude Haiku, grounded in the current season context.

AI Race Oracle is a separate pre-race prediction pipeline that runs about 30 minutes before lights out, generates a podium pick using Gemini Pro plus search, and scores it automatically once the race ends.

Corrections

If something is wrong — a score, a stat, a name — tell me. The fix policy is on the corrections page.