Watchparty

Watchparty is Smedley Group Advanced Technology’s Formula 1 data platform and pit wall webapp. It turns live and historical F1 timing, telemetry and weather data into a windowed workspace of widgets: timing towers, lap-time charts, track maps, tyre degradation models and a strategy engine, all built on the same versioned data underneath.

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What You Can Do

• Watch a session live. As soon as a session is underway, Watchparty ingests the live feed and streams it to you lap by lap, sector by sector.
• Replay any archived weekend. Once a session has been captured (live or backfilled from historical data), you can open it again later. It behaves identically to a live session: same widgets, same insights, same interactions.
• Compare drivers, tyres and strategies. Overlay lap times, compare telemetry traces, rank tyre degradation, and see how a race’s strategy could have played out under different assumptions.

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How the Data Gets to You

Live timing and telemetry arrive from OpenF1’s live feed. Historical weekends are backfilled from FastF1. Both routes converge on the same pipeline before anything is stored: the raw payload is archived first, then a single normalisation step turns it into rows in the platform’s TimescaleDB store, and publishes each normalised record onto a Redis channel for that session. From there, an insights layer subscribes to the same stream and computes the metrics you actually see: tyre degradation models, fuel-corrected lap times, running order, track evolution and more. Each metric is versioned, so you always know which version of the maths produced what you’re looking at. A gateway service is the only door into any of this from outside: it exposes a REST API for historical queries and a WebSocket stream for live updates. The webapp you’re using talks to nothing else, not the database, not Redis directly, only the gateway. Read the full story in Data Journey.

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Picking a Session

Sessions are organised as a year stack: each season is a row, and within a season, weekends fan out as a deck of cards, one card per race weekend. Navigate years with the arrows or by clicking a peeking row, and step between weekends within a year using the arrows, a drag, or the mouse wheel. Each weekend card offers one session per slot (practice, qualifying, race), preferring the canonical FastF1 data once it exists. A slot that holds more than one copy of the same session shows one small button per source instead of a single button, labelled FastF1, OpenF1 or Pre-race, so you can open exactly the copy you mean rather than only the card’s default.

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Your Workspace

A session opens as a workbook of tabs. Each tab is a grid of widget windows you can drag, resize and close, and every tab remembers its own arrangement, including where a closed widget sat so it comes back in the same place.

• Add a widget from the palette on the left: drag its card onto the grid, or click it to drop it into the first free slot. A widget already open on the tab shows greyed out; one instance per tab.
• Manage tabs in the strip along the top: + adds an empty tab, double-click a name to rename it, and the x deletes it. The last remaining tab cannot be deleted.
• Playback, session and driver selection are shared across tabs, so switching tabs never pauses or reseeks the session.
• Reset layout, at the right of the transport footer, restores the default workbook after a confirmation. It discards every custom tab and arrangement.

Your arrangement is saved in the browser as you go, so it is there the next time you open Watchparty. The default workbook has twelve tabs and opens on GPS:

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Widget Catalogue

Every widget below reads from the same live/replay stream through the gateway. Where a widget only makes sense for certain session types, the card says so; elsewhere it shows a plain not-applicable state rather than an empty chart.

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Timing

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Track

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Tyres

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Strategy

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Context

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Concepts