Best Approach to Retrieve Qualification and Race Results Using OpenF1 API

[vitocustodero]

I’m using the OpenF1 API to retrieve the results of FP1, FP2, FP3, Qualifying, and the Race. For the Free Practice sessions, I’m sorting the laps by time for each driver, and the results I get are satisfactory. However, the situation is different for Qualifying, where I can’t find any details about the individual segments like Q1, Q2, and Q3. The same issue occurs with the Race results. I was considering using the position API, but I believe that may not be the correct approach. What is the best method to properly retrieve this information?

[Lyro1]

Hi there!
Question there: how do you retrieve the results of each session? I can't seem to find a good way of getting results properly

[vitocustodero]

For free practice sessions, the best approach is to take each driver’s fastest lap and sort them by lap time.

However, this method is not suitable for qualifying.

For races, some have attempted to use the API position by taking the driver’s last recorded position, but this doesn’t always provide accurate results.

[JeffreyJPZ]

Not sure if you're still looking for an answer, but for anyone else with the same question, you can call the F1 livetiming API directly to get the start/finish times for each session.

Just make a request to https://livetiming.formula1.com/static/{year}/Index.json (replace {year} with the desired year), find the appropriate path for the session you want, and get the SessionData topic.For example, 2025 Belgian GP Qualifying would be https://livetiming.formula1.com/static/2025/2025-07-27_Belgian_Grand_Prix/2025-07-26_Qualifying/SessionData.json.

For non-qualifying sessions its not to difficult to figure out the session start/time (SessionStatus should be "Started" or "Finished"), but for qualifying sessions you'd probably have to sort the StatusSeries array by time, iterate over the array and save the start/end times for each qualifying part because there are mulitple "Started" and "Finished" statuses.

After that, you can probably filter lap times by driver using the start/finish times and get the results from there.