For the paddock rumors feature i collect data from the jolpi.ca API and exper…

Good question — and there's actually a fantastic authoritative source for car upgrades you may not be using yet.

Car upgrades — the FIA itself publishes them

Every race weekend the FIA publishes a document called "Car Presentation Submissions" on its decision-documents page. It's a PDF where each team lists, in a structured table, every updated component for that weekend with four columns:

• Updated component (e.g. "Floor Edge", "Front Wing", "Coke/Engine Cover")
• Primary reason for update (Performance — Flow Conditioning / Local Load / Circuit-specific — Cooling Range / etc.)
• Geometric differences vs. previous version
• Brief description (20–100 words) of how it works

You can grab them here: https://www.fia.com/documents/championships/fia-formula-one-world-championship-14 — it's the same page that hosts stewards' decisions, technical directives, etc. They're typically published Friday morning of each race weekend. The URL pattern for the PDF itself is predictable, e.g. fia.com/system/files/decision-document/2025_dutch_grand_prix_-_car_presentation_submissions.pdf, so you can scrape it on a schedule.

This is much better than scraping rumor sites because it's authoritative, structured, free, and forces teams to declare in their own words why a part was changed (which makes great input for a "rumors / what's new" feature). The downside is PDF parsing, but the layout is pretty consistent — pdfplumber handles it well.

For planned/upcoming upgrades (not yet on the car), the FIA doc won't help. There the best sources are:

• The Race, Motorsport.com, Autosport, RacingNews365 — they all preview upgrade packages a week or two ahead based on team principal interviews. RSS feeds available.
• AMuS (Auto Motor und Sport) — German publication, often first with upgrade leaks, especially for Mercedes/Audi.
• Raceteq — Red Bull-adjacent but does decent technical breakdowns.

Other data worth pulling

A few things that pair well with your existing jolpi.ca + f1technical.net setup:

• Pirelli tyre compound allocation per race — Pirelli publishes a preview PDF for every GP with the C1–C5 selection, expected degradation, and pit-stop strategy predictions. Very strong predictive signal.
• FIA "PU Elements used per driver" — also on the FIA documents page, published Thursday/Friday. Tells you who's close to a grid penalty for taking a new ICE/MGU-K/etc. This is gold for predicting unexpected grid drops.
• FIA stewards' decisions — penalties, reprimands, grid drops, all on the same documents page.
• Practice session timing — jolpi.ca has results but the unofficial F1 live timing feed (e.g. via the fastf1 Python library) gives you FP1/FP2/FP3 long-run pace, which is the single best predictor of race pace.
• Circuit metadata — DRS zones, elevation, average pit-loss time, overtaking difficulty index. Some of this is in fastf1, some you'd build once and reuse.
• Driver track history — derivable from jolpi.ca: average finish, podium rate, DNF rate per circuit per driver. Cheap to compute, useful for predictions.
• Reddit r/formula1 — the official Reddit API still works for free at low volume. The "hot" posts in the 48h before a race are a decent proxy for paddock sentiment / breaking rumors.
• Press conference transcripts — FIA publishes these too (Thursday driver/team-principal pressers). Good raw text for an LLM to extract upgrade hints, intra-team tensions, etc.

If you want, I can sketch what a scraper for the FIA Car Presentation PDF would look like — but per your usual workflow I'll wait for your go-ahead before writing any code.

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