Methodology and trust

A pre-qualifying prediction with a clear evidence trail.

Apex Pulse turns public practice-session evidence into a qualifying forecast, freezes it before qualifying, and evaluates it only after official results are available.

Prediction foundation

A focused output, built from public evidence.

Foundation

01

What Apex Pulse predicts

The core output is each driver’s predicted gap to pole and the resulting qualifying ranking. The public artifacts do not currently claim pole or Q3 probabilities.

Foundation

02

Data sources

FastF1 provides public historical practice laps, results, timing, weather and limited public telemetry. Local cached event schedules supply the displayed session times.

How Apex Pulse works

One controlled lifecycle from practice to evaluation.

  1. 03

    Practice checkpoints

    The dataset supports predictions after FP1, FP2 and FP3. Each checkpoint can use only the sessions that have already happened.

  2. 04

    Feature engineering

    Interpretable practice pace, sector performance, tyre context, teammate-relative pace, session conditions and strictly time-aware historical form are the foundation.

  3. 05

    Model policy

    Candidate tabular models are compared with strong practice and historical baselines using season-aware, walk-forward evaluation. The selected policy is exported by the backend.

  4. 06

    Forecast and settlement

    The forecast is written before qualifying and preserved immutably. Settlement is a separate post-qualifying comparison; it never rewrites or fills missing predictions.

Evaluation and transparency

Performance claims stay attached to their evidence.

07

Evaluation metrics

Gap MAE and RMSE measure pace error. Mean absolute position error and top-k agreement show how well the ranking matched the official order.

08

Public-data limitations

The project has no private team data, paid live feed, fuel state, brake pressure, battery state or real-time telemetry. Public signals are partial and may be stale or incomplete.

09

Prospective evidence and backtests

Predictions made before an observed qualifying session are reported separately from historical model-development backtests and legacy noncanonical records.

Technical lifecycle details
Contract version
Dashboard schema 1.0
Access mode
Read-only exported JSON
Forecast preservation
Immutable snapshots
Schedule source
Existing local FastF1 cache
Operator actions
Not exposed by the website
Live telemetry
Not provided