Fastest Speed with Lap Number

[soundsessential]

Hey @br-g

I'd posted a discussion about this some time ago and today decided to look into it further. The Fastest Speed Award on the F1 website does not line up with the fastest speed from the Laps endpoint. That's not necessarily an issue as those speeds, I think, are through a speed trap at a certain point on the track.

So then I looked at the car_data endpoint and for Canada I see this: https://api.openf1.org/v1/car_data?session_key=11291&speed%3E=350

[
  {
    "date": "2026-05-24T20:15:16.691000+00:00",
    "session_key": 11291,
    "speed": 350,
    "n_gear": 8,
    "throttle": 100,
    "meeting_key": 1285,
    "brake": 0,
    "rpm": 12006,
    "driver_number": 10,
    "drs": null
  },
  {
    "date": "2026-05-24T20:15:16.930000+00:00",
    "session_key": 11291,
    "speed": 350,
    "n_gear": 8,
    "throttle": 100,
    "meeting_key": 1285,
    "brake": 0,
    "rpm": 12028,
    "driver_number": 10,
    "drs": null
  },
  {
    "date": "2026-05-24T20:15:17.130000+00:00",
    "session_key": 11291,
    "speed": 350,
    "n_gear": 8,
    "throttle": 100,
    "meeting_key": 1285,
    "brake": 0,
    "rpm": 12042,
    "driver_number": 10,
    "drs": null
  },
  {
    "date": "2026-05-24T20:15:17.450000+00:00",
    "session_key": 11291,
    "speed": 350,
    "n_gear": 8,
    "throttle": 100,
    "meeting_key": 1285,
    "brake": 0,
    "rpm": 12051,
    "driver_number": 10,
    "drs": null
  }
]

Is there an easy way from your side to add what lap number these instances occurred? For some people, the location of the car at the time of the recorded event might also be interesting. This could probably be done on our side by correlating the timestamp with data from the laps and location endpoints, but figured I'd ask. Thank you!

[br-g]

Hey @soundsessential, thanks for the detailed investigation, and good catch on the discrepancy between the Fastest Speed Award and the Laps endpoint.

Adding a lap number (or location) to car_data is something I've considered, but it's trickier than it looks. The car_data and laps endpoints come from independent data streams that aren't synchronized at the source, so attaching a lap number to every telemetry sample would require us to do timestamp-based correlation server-side for millions of rows per session. It's doable, but the added complexity (and storage cost) is hard to justify given how few use cases actually need it.

I'll leave this open for now in case there's broader interest, but I don't plan to prioritize it in the near term. Thanks again for taking the time to dig into this and write it up so clearly!