Release Notes

Looking for Release Notes for Older Versions?

What’s new in v3.4.0

(released 26/07/2024)

New Features

• Completely reimplemented the fastf1.plotting module. The new module provides a more flexible and powerful API for creating custom plots. This is an overview of the relevant new features and changes:

  • Driver and team names, abbreviations and colors are now supported for all seasons since 2018 instead of only for the most recent season.

  • Driver changes and test drivers running in free practice session are now supported automatically and do no longer require an update of FastF1.

  • Users can now choose between the “offcial” F1 color map and the color map that was already used previously by FastF1.

  • Driver specific colors are deprecated. Users are encouraged to use more visually distinct plot styling options instead to differentiate between drivers of the same team. The new get_driver_style() function can be used to easily get driver specific styling options.

  • Users can override team colors and short name constants on a per-session basis.

  • The API has been improved to be more consistent and easier to use.

• Added support for a fallback mirror for the F1 livetiming API. If the primary API is unavailable, FastF1 will automatically switch to the fallback mirror and continue to work without any user intervention. This feature is experimental and for now provided without any guarantees.

• Added a warning that informs users when event, driver or team names are fuzzy matched. (by @Casper-Guo) (#574)

• Improved fuzzy matching of event names to give better matching results. (by @Casper-Guo) (#579)

• Added support for Numpy v2.0.

• The SignalRClient can now be started when an async event loop is already running by awaiting the new fastf1.livetiming.client.SignalRClient.async_start() coroutine. This enables usage in newer versions of Juypter Notebooks, for example.

• Set a default connection timeout of five seconds for all requests to the Ergast API. This should prevent long data loading times when the API is unresponsive.

Bug Fixes

• Drivers that crashed on the very first lap are now assigned NaN as their position, ensuring correct positions throughout the field at then end of the first lap. (by @AND2797) (#595)

• Fixed a bug that prevented loading of any data when driver information was unavailable from the F1 livetiming API.

• Fixed a bug in the client side rate limiting that allowed higher rates than intended. This may have caused the client to be temporarily blocked by the server.

Deprecations

• The following module level properties of fastf1.plotting have been deprecated: COMPOUND_COLORS, DRIVER_COLORS, DRIVER_TRANSLATE, TEAM_COLORS, TEAM_TRANSLATE, COLOR_PALETTE

• The following functions in fastf1.plotting have been deprecated: driver_color(), team_color(), lapnumber_axis()

• The argument misc_mpl_mods of function setup_mpl() is deprecated and will be removed in the future without replacement for its functionality.

• The argument color_scheme of function setup_mpl() will default to None in the future, meaning that FastF1’s default color scheme will need to be enabled explicitly.

Increased minimum versions for dependencies

• The new minimum version of Python is 3.9. Support for Python 3.8 is dropped.

• The minimum versions for the following dependencies have been increased:

  • numpy to >=1.23.1

  • scipy to >=1.8.1