Inspiration Every F1 fan has had that moment — yelling at the TV because the team pitted too late, or picked the wrong tyre. But strategy has always been something only the teams understood. We wanted to change that and give fans a way to actually play with the decisions themselves. What it does The Overtake lets you run F1 race strategy like a real pit wall engineer. Pick a driver, a track, a tyre, and weather conditions. It then shows you how lap times will change over the race, when the best time to pit is, and how different tyres compare. A Claude AI then reads your setup and gives you a short, plain-English breakdown of whether your strategy is good or not. How we built it
The look and feel: Built from scratch in HTML, CSS, and JavaScript. We added F1-style details like animated start lights, a rev counter bar, sparks flying across the background, and a live timing strip to make it feel like a real broadcast The tyre model: We built a system that calculates how each tyre compound degrades lap by lap — Soft, Medium, Hard, Inter, and Wet — across 7 real F1 circuits Pit stop logic: The app figures out the best lap to pit based on tyre life and race length, and shows your full stint plan as a visual timeline AI layer: We send the full race scenario to Claude, which comes back with a short strategy note — risks, tyre behaviour, and a recommendation — like a real race engineer would give
Challenges we ran into
Making the tyre degradation feel realistic without real data. We had to study race results and tune the numbers by hand until they felt right The time delta was broken for a while. It was comparing the wrong lap times and always showed near-zero. We fixed it by comparing the average lap time of your chosen tyre against Medium as a benchmark The tyre buttons stopped working in certain environments. Turns out inline click handlers get blocked in sandboxed pages, so we rewrote the whole thing using a single listener on the parent element Getting all the background animations to run smoothly at the same time without slowing the page down
Accomplishments that we're proud of
The whole thing runs in the browser with no server needed — strategy model, AI call, charts, and animations all work together instantly It actually looks and feels like an F1 app
What we learned
A number on screen is only useful if it means something real — fixing the delta bug taught us to always ask "does this reflect what the user actually cares about?" The small details — lights, sounds, animations — make people feel something. The start lights alone made the whole app feel 10x more alive Claude gives much better answers when you give it a role and real context, not just a generic question
What's next for The Overtake
Live race data — connect to real telemetry so the simulator uses actual lap times, not estimates Two-driver battles — put two strategies head to head and watch the gap change lap by lap Live weather — trigger rain or a safety car mid-race and see how the strategy should change Team profiles — Red Bull, Ferrari, McLaren all think differently about strategy. We want the AI to reflect that Mobile app — so fans can use it live while watching a race
Same structure, much easier to read. Want any section shorter or punched up a bit more?
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