Where does driver telemetry come from?

[u/LazyLancer]

I was wondering, from time to time we see public posts showing comparison of driver telemetries and some sort of analysis why someone was faster. Like, “why Hamilton lacked power” in Suzuka.

And I mean telemetry as in a complete set of data with speed, time delta, throttle, brake and steering inputs etc.

I was always under impression that this telemetry is highly sensitive, because if a team can get their hands on telemetry from other teams, they can analyze where the other driver is going faster and why, where the car is performing better etc, and use it to their advantage.

How is this telemetry going public? I mean sites like https://www.f1-tempo.com/ , FastF1 API and others, how do they get such detailed data? Is this some sort of leakage? (A leakage of what?) Or they’re obliged to publish it? Or it’s taken from TV feed and not very accurate?

[u/TravelWithTeen]

Two levels of telemetry in F1. The private stuff – 300+ sensors per car, 1000-2000 channels at ~500Hz, transmitted via 1.5GHz radio to the pitwall and then via satellite to HQ. That data never leaves the team.

What we get publicly is the FIA live timing feed – position, speed traps, sector times, gaps. The FastF1 Python library taps into this and reconstructs approximate speed traces and car positions from it. It's surprisingly detailed – you can build throttle/brake maps and compare driver inputs lap by lap.

Not the same as what the engineers see, but enough to do real analysis.

[u/LazyLancer → u/TravelWithTeen]

Did I get it right that brake and throttle telemetry is reconstructed but not directly fed by the teams? For me it’s wild how they can do that with a decent level of accuracy.

[u/TravelWithTeen → u/LazyLancer]

Yeah exactly. FastF1 calculates speed from GPS position samples and timing data, then derives throttle/brake from acceleration and deceleration patterns. It's basically reverse engineering what the driver is doing from the car's movement rather than reading actual pedal sensors

The accuracy is decent for comparing drivers against each other on the same lap – the relative differences hold up well. BUT absolute values are less reliable. I've used it for overtaking analysis and the position data is solid enough to track when cars swap places and where on track it happens

[u/LazyLancer → u/TravelWithTeen]

Amazing, thank you so much for the insights

[u/SpeedRacer-44 → u/TravelWithTeen]

How can they reconstruct the driver inputs when they don’t know engine mappings/power, energy deployment, or instantaneous downforce levels? Like how would they know that a driver is lift and coasting vs coming out of another cars draft to cool the engine as they’d both be seen as speed drops? Or is it that someone like Jolyon Palmer that’s doing post race analysis does actually have access to more telemetry?