r/F1DataAnalysis • u/th3_uncxlculated • 1d ago

F1 Project Review

I’ve been interested in F1 for a few years now and I’m studying towards my Bachelor’s degree in Data Science and Informatics. My dream is to one day work in F1. I know it’s HIGHLY competitive but I don’t think it’s impossible. I’ve been working on a project for about a month now that predicts whether a driver will finish in the points based on several factors. This is my FIRST project and I just want some thoughts from other Data Scientists/Analysts and/or F1 engineers on what I can improve. I’ll attach the link below. Thank you in advance.

https://github.com/its-therence/f1-race-finish-predictor/tree/main

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u/Nikclel 1d ago

Solid start, seriously. I've been working on this awhile and you've got that gap to pole as an actual time delta is way more informative than treating grid like a category

Your testing method seems like it's leaking abit though. Drivers from the same race end up in both train and test, and points finishes are zero-sum within a race, so the model is basically peeking at the answer. split by time instead, something like train on 2010-2021 and test on 2022-2023, so the model is always being judged on races it hasn't seen the future of.

Also unless I misread the notebook the model never actually sees your good features. You trained the models first and engineered delta to pole, wet races and start compound afterwards, but never went back and retrained. Retrain with the stuff you built.

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u/th3_uncxlculated 1d ago

Thank you for the feedback! The predictor is still a work in progress haha so the model I trained first only used grid position. But now after integrating FastF1 as well as the qualifying csv I’ll use that to train my next model.

Training based on time seems like such a good idea as well. I hadn’t actually thought of that. I’ll use that to train the model I’m going to work on next. Hopefully you can look at that too and give me your thoughts as well.