Show HN: F1 COSMOS – Live timing and data dashboard for F1 fans
f1cosmos.comHey everyone! I'm a huge F1 fan and got tired of juggling multiple tabs and apps during race weekends, so I built F1 COSMOS.
What it does:
- Live timing: Real-time data updates in milliseconds - sector times, telemetry, team radio, you name it. No more refreshing pages or waiting for delayed updates.
- Replay feature: Missed qualifying or fell asleep during practice? You can replay the live timing from any past session. Pretty handy when you're in a bad timezone.
- Proper data visualization: I went beyond just showing lap times. There's race analysis with telemetry data, championship standings, technical updates, and a bunch of other stats that make watching races way more interesting. Oh, and the race calendar automatically adjusts to your timezone because I was sick of doing timezone math in my head.
- Multi-device setup: Here's the thing - I watch races on my TV but wanted data on my phone as a second screen. So I spent ages making the mobile experience smooth for exactly this use case. Desktop has customizable widgets if you're into that.
Technical stuff:
Built with modern web stack, focused heavily on real-time performance. The trickiest part was getting the data pipeline right for millisecond updates without everything falling apart.
Why I built this: Honestly, existing F1 apps either suck or cost money or both. I wanted something that just works and gives me all the data I actually care about in one place.
Been using it myself all season and figured others might find it useful. Currently supports English, Spanish, Japanese, and Korean (partially) - still working on expanding language support. Would love to hear what you think if you check it out during the next race weekend.
This is really slick. I remember when I used to have the F1TV version pulled up on my laptop during sessions - eventually I decided it wasn't that helpful. The radio and race control panels on this are awesome.
Definitely giving it a test run during the race tomorrow!
Thank you so much. Please try it out and let me know if you have any feedback!
Really, really love the interface and the way you have the calendar, FIA docs, etc available too. Shout out for the delay feature -- I was able to sync it perfectly with my TV stream!
The big problem I had was desync. Every 5-10 minutes, random parts of the interface would stop updating. Sometimes the whole page would blank out. I was able to fix it once by loading one of the other panels (like the FIA docs) and then going back to the live data. Eventually it broke and I wasn't able to fix it (around lap 18 or so). Thinking maybe sockets aren't reconnecting when their connection drops from the client side? And it seemed like there was some issue that prevented it from fixing with a simple refresh.
That's right. I'm truly sorry. This race had three times the traffic of a normal race and twice the traffic of the previous day's qualifying, so i had to urgently upscale our server instances, and i confirmed that several instances experienced issues..
I plan to implement stabilization measures throughout the live timing server code during this summer break.
I sincerely apologize for any inconvenience caused during this important race.
This is very cool! Are you using the OpenF1 API?
I've been trying to reduce the sources of data as much as possible, and open f1 is one of them.
Just curious, what is the source for this data?
Data is received via signalR.
Wow, this is just stunning. I will be using it tomorrow morning. Thanks for making this!
Thank you. Please use it well!
Awesome! Thank you for making this free available
It's my pleasure to see our user base grow :)