[Update] F1 Live Timing API changes — what’s affected, what’s fixed, and what’s coming
Hi everyone,
I wanted to share a detailed update on what has been happening with the integration over the past few weeks, following reports of missing tyre data and Championship Prediction sensors showing unknown during the 2026 season opener.
What changed in the F1 Live Timing API
During last season, F1’s Live Timing service no longer freely delivers all data streams via its SignalR connection. A number of streams now require a valid F1 TV subscription (an authenticated JWT token) to receive live data. This went largely unnoticed at first because Replay Mode continued to work perfectly, replay uses static archive files that are stored on F1’s servers without any authentication requirement. So everything looked fine in replay, but the live connection was silently missing data for certain sensors.
What is affected
The core of the integration, timing, session status, track status, race control messages, lap counts, weather, driver lists, sector times, and tyre data, all come from streams that remain fully open without authentication. These continue to work live, no changes needed.
The streams that are now auth-gated are:
- Championship Prediction (driver and team standings predictions during a session)
- Pit Stop Series (live pit stop data)
- Driver Race Info (position changes, gap calculations used by some sensors)
- Car telemetry (CarData.z / Position.z) — compressed high-frequency telemetry
Replay-only sensors
Rather than silently show stale or unknown values, sensors that depend on auth-gated streams will be designated as Replay Only. This means they will update correctly when you play back a finished session, but will not receive live updates during a race. The Lovelace card will been updated to show a clear amber indicator when a sensor is in this state, so you’ll know the data shown is from the archive rather than live.
What will be fixed
Two significant fixes have landed in BETA based on this analysis:
Tyre data source migration. The integration previously used TyreStintSeries as its primary source for tyre compound data. That stream is unreliable live. It has been replaced with TimingAppData, which is the same approach used by others and is confirmed open and stable. Tyre data (compound, new/used, stint laps) should be reliable during live sessions.
SignalR protocol upgrade. The integration has been migrated from the legacy ASP.NET SignalR protocol to ASP.NET Core SignalR. The legacy protocol required re-subscribing every 5 minutes due to Azure connection limits, which caused 589 reconnects over a two-day period in testing. The Core protocol has built-in ping/pong keepalives and is significantly more stable. This will be verified against packet captures from the Japanese GP.
Why authentication is not being implemented right now
Several users have asked about adding F1 TV login support to restore the auth-gated streams. I want to be transparent here: I do not personally have an F1 TV Pro subscription, which means I cannot test an authenticated integration end-to-end against real live data. Shipping untested auth code risks breaking things for everyone, including the streams that currently work fine.
My priority right now is making sure the open streams, which cover the majority of what most users care about, are as stable and accurate as possible. Once the current fixes are validated across a few race weekends, authentication can be revisited. Any contributions or testing help from users who do have F1 TV Pro would be very welcome.
What’s still being monitored
A capture service is running on my homelab server recording live SignalR data across multiple parallel streams. This gives direct visibility into exactly what data F1’s servers are delivering. I’ll continue using this to validate sensor behaviour across upcoming race weekends.
Thanks for your patience and for all the bug reports, the detailed logs from issues like #427, #428, and #425 were essential to tracking this down. Feel free to reply here or open an issue on GitHub if you notice anything unexpected.
Thank you all for contributing to this little hobby project of mine.