🏎️ SimGent — Simulator Agent: Autonomous AI Pit Wall & Telemetry Cockpit

Independent Open-Source Motorsport Telemetry Cockpit, 2D Vector Replay Player, & Autonomous AI Race Engineer (1950–2026)

Experience the Live Application: 👉 https://simgent.tonyyang.work 📖 Engineering Deep-Dive & Interview Playbook: 👉 DICTIONARY.md

[!IMPORTANT] Legal Notice & Trademark Disclaimer (Nominative Fair Use): SimGent (Simulator Agent) is an independent, non-commercial open-source research and educational demonstration project developed by fans. SimGent is not affiliated, associated, authorized, endorsed by, or in any way officially connected with Formula One Licensing B.V., Formula One World Championship Limited, the FIA (Fédération Internationale de l'Automobile), Formula One Management (FOM), or any Formula 1 constructor, team, or driver.

All trademarks, service marks, trade names, and team identities referenced within this repository and application (including but not limited to F1, FORMULA ONE, FORMULA 1, FIA FORMULA ONE WORLD CHAMPIONSHIP, team marks, and circuit names) are the property of their respective owners. They are used only to refer to the real teams, drivers, events and circuits, for historical identification, technical analysis and education. No commercial relationship, sponsorship, license, or endorsement is expressed or implied.

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👨‍👦 Built for the Love of Racing: A Father & Kids Project

Every race weekend, my kids and I sit together watching the Grand Prix. Between safety car restarts, undercut attempts, and telemetry deltas, they would constantly ask:

• "Dad, why did Ferrari box so early?"
• "Is Norris actually catching Verstappen, or is he saving his tyres?"
• "What happened to Hamilton's engine on Lap 17?"

Commercial timing screens are locked behind paywalls or designed like 1990s spreadsheets that kids can't explore. I wanted to build something intuitive and inspiring for them: a 60 FPS interactive 2D replay cockpit paired with an autonomous AI Race Engineer they could talk to in plain English.

What started as a family race-day side project became SimGent (short for Simulator Agent) — an open-source race replay and pit wall agent covering every World Championship race since 1950.

What is real data and what is modelled. Results, grids, pit stops and championship standings come from Jolpica-F1 (OpenF1 fills in sprint and qualifying sessions before Jolpica publishes them). Lap-by-lap replays use real lap times from 1996 onwards; earlier races are reconstructed from the results (finishing order, laps completed, retirements). Car positions within a lap and the speed profile are modelled from the circuit outline. There is no car telemetry (speed, throttle, brake) in the data. Every race is shown on the layout actually raced that year, with its length, turns and direction from F1DB. Outlines come from bacinger/f1-circuits, OpenStreetMap (Jerez, Fuji, Korea, Reims-Gueux 1950-51) and, for the other historic layouts, f1-circuits-svg, whose start/finish line is estimated.

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📸 Application Showcase

1. High-Performance 2D Vector Replay Cockpit (Dark Mode)

Unobstructed racing line view across 40+ Grand Prix circuits, 20+ synchronized car models in team-inspired colors, timing tower, lap-time and gap charts, and session debriefs.

2. Daytime Light Mode Cockpit

High-contrast day theme engineered for daylight readability with full SVG vector sharpness and collapsible telemetry HUDs.

3. Autonomous AI Pit Wall & Interactive A2UI Action Cards

Natural language race engineer answering tactical, strategy, and incident queries. The AI emits interactive A2UI action cards ([EXPLORE 2021 REPLAY]) that directly scrub the replay camera and telemetry timeline to the exact lap and corner of the incident.

4. Technical Regulations & Power Unit Era Matrix (1950–2026)

In-depth technical comparison of engine architectures, electrical deployment splits, active aerodynamics (X/Z-mode), and chassis regulations across 75+ years of Grand Prix racing history.

5. Strategy Lab & Monte Carlo "What-If" Battle Simulator

Full-distance tactical race battle simulations between any two driver strategies. Features non-linear tire degradation curves, fuel burn-off dynamics, and a 200-iteration Monte Carlo engine with stochastic win probabilities.

🎥 Demo (about 40 seconds): Watch the screen recording (MP4), or see it on tonyyang.work.

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✨ Key Features & Capabilities

1. Interactive 2D Vector Circuit Replay

• Full normalized vector track maps rendered from real geospatial circuit coordinates (f1-circuits.geojson).
• Dynamic heading rotation (\theta = \arctan2(\Delta y, \Delta x)) synchronizing micro-car models with team-inspired colors (Ferrari #E80020, Red Bull #3671C6, McLaren #FF8000, Mercedes #27F4D2, Aston Martin #229971, etc.).
• Real-time Race Control event transponders: Safety Car (SC), Virtual Safety Car (VSC), Red Flags, Yellow Flags, and non-finisher (DNF) markers.
• Fully collapsible, movable HUDs: minimizes the Driver Card and Circuit Intel HUD for an unobstructed view of the racing line.

2. Autonomous AI Pit Wall Radio

• Ask any natural language question about pit stop tactics, tire degradation, regulations, or historical retirements.
• Answers come from the cached data by a deterministic agent with a small local embedding router (no API key or LLM needed; this is how the live site runs). An optional LLM layer (Groq, Gemini or Ollama) can be enabled with your own keys.
• Tactical Action Cards: The agent doesn't just return text; it synthesizes interactive action cards (e.g. [JUMP TO LAP 17 REPLAY]) that scrub the replay directly to the incident.

3. Lap-Time and Gap Charts

• Lap-time comparison for up to three drivers, from real lap timing (1996 onwards).
• A modelled speed profile per circuit, estimated from corner geometry (labelled as a model; not car telemetry).
• DRS zones shown from 2011, straight-line (active aero) mode from 2026.

4. Every Grand Prix Since 1950

• Results for every World Championship race, 1950–2026; full lap-timing replays from 1996, earlier races reconstructed from results.
• Cached data in the repo, so answers need no network calls.
• Automatic sync from Jolpica-F1 (and OpenF1 for sprint and qualifying) every 6 hours, hourly on race weekends.

5. Strategy Lab & Interactive "What-If" Battle Simulator

• Full-distance tactical race battle simulations between any two driver strategies.
• Non-linear compound degradation curves (Soft, Medium, Hard, Intermediate, Wet) coupled with fuel burn-off physics.
• Safety Car neutralisations, dynamic pit stop deltas, and automatic crossover overtake lap detection.
• 200-iteration Monte Carlo engine computing stochastic win probability percentages and finish margins.
• Curated Iconic Historical Presets:
  • 2021 Abu Dhabi GP: What if Mercedes boxed Hamilton for Softs under the Latifi Safety Car?
  • 2024 British GP: What if McLaren fitted Norris with fresh Mediums instead of used Softs?
  • 2026 Bahrain GP: Verstappen aggressive 2-stop pursuit vs Russell 1-stop conservation.
  • 1998 Belgian GP: What if Schumacher avoided the spray collision with Coulthard?
• Interactive SVG chart of the simulated gap across the race distance.

6. 2026 FIA Technical Regulations Primer

• Deep interactive technical guide contrasting the upcoming 2026 Engine & Aero era:
  • 50/50 Internal Combustion vs. 350 kW Electric Power split.
  • Elimination of the complex MGU-H.
  • Active Aerodynamics (Z-Mode for cornering downforce, X-Mode for low drag on straights).
  • Manual Overtake Mode (MOM) override bursts.

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📐 System Architecture

flowchart TD
    subgraph ClientLayer["🖥️ Frontend Cockpit & Client Interfaces"]
        UI["High-Performance Web Cockpit\n(Tailwind CSS + HTML5 Canvas + WebGL)"]
        Mobile["Responsive Mobile Deck\n(Collapsible HUD + Ergonomic Touch Targets)"]
        ExternalLLM["Cursor / Claude Desktop / MCP Clients\n(stdio JSON-RPC)"]
    end

    subgraph SecurityLayer["🛡️ Pit Wall Security & Edge Guardrails"]
        RateLimit["In-Memory Token Bucket Limiter\n(60 req/min per IP)"]
        Sanitizer["Input Sanitizer & Unicode Normalizer\n(Max 500 Chars)"]
        InjectionGuard["Adversarial Prompt Injection Shield\n(Checked before model routing)"]
        CardSanitizer["Tactical Card Sanitizer\n(Hex Color + XSS Escape Enforcement)"]
    end

    subgraph RouterLayer["⚡ Dynamic Multi-LLM Orchestrator"]
        Router["Multi-Tier LLM Router\n(app/tools/llm_router.py)"]
        T1["Tier 1: Groq Cloud\n(Llama 3.3 70B Versatile · Account-specific quotas)"]
        T2["Tier 2: Local Edge Ollama\n(Qwen 2.5 / DeepSeek R1 Distill)"]
        T3["Tier 3: Gemini 2.5 Flash\n(Account-specific quotas and pricing)"]
        T0["Tier 0: Deterministic Telemetry Transponder\n(Zero API Calls · Local fallback)"]
    end

    subgraph EngineLayer["⚙️ Core Telemetry & Simulation Engines"]
        ReplayEngine["Temporal Replay Engine\n(app/tools/race_replay.py)"]
        TelemetryEngine["Telemetry Synthesizer & Delta Computer\n(app/tools/f1_telemetry.py)"]
        JolpicaSync["Jolpica / Ergast Synchronizer\n(app/tools/jolpica_sync.py)"]
        MCPServer["SimGent MCP Server\n(mcp_server.py)"]
    end

    subgraph DataLayer["💾 Indexed Database & Local Cache"]
        GeoJSON["f1-circuits.geojson\n(Normalized 2D Vector Geometry)"]
        JolpicaCache["Historical JSON Data Cache\n(1950–2026 Season Races, Laps, Results)"]
        TelemetryBlueprints["Track Curvature & Speed Blueprints\n(40+ Formula 1 Circuits)"]
    end

    UI --> RateLimit
    Mobile --> RateLimit
    ExternalLLM --> MCPServer

    RateLimit --> Sanitizer --> InjectionGuard
    InjectionGuard -->|Valid Query| Router
    InjectionGuard -->|Adversarial Detected| UI

    Router -->|Primary| T1
    Router -->|Failover 1| T2
    Router -->|Failover 2| T3
    Router -->|Failover 3 / Offline| T0

    T1 & T2 & T3 & T0 --> CardSanitizer --> UI

    UI <--> ReplayEngine
    UI <--> TelemetryEngine
    MCPServer <--> ReplayEngine
    MCPServer <--> TelemetryEngine

    ReplayEngine <--> JolpicaCache
    ReplayEngine <--> GeoJSON
    TelemetryEngine <--> TelemetryBlueprints
    JolpicaSync <--> JolpicaCache

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🔄 Autonomous Agent & Tactical Replay Flow

sequenceDiagram
    autonumber
    actor User as 👤 Race Fan / Analyst
    participant Front as 🖥️ Cockpit UI
    participant Guard as 🛡️ Security Guardrail
    participant Router as ⚡ LLM Router
    participant Agent as 🏎️ Pit Wall AI Agent
    participant DB as 💾 Telemetry Engine

    User->>Front: "Why did Hamilton retire in Australia 2024?"
    Front->>Guard: POST /api/chat {query, context}
    Guard->>Guard: Check Rate Limit (60 RPM) & Adversarial Injection
    alt Clean Query
        Guard->>Router: Forward Sanitized Prompt
        Router->>Agent: Route to Groq / Gemini / Deterministic Engine
        Agent->>DB: Ingest Leader Laps & Curated Steward Incident Logs
        DB-->>Agent: Return Power Unit Failure at Turn 10 (Lap 17)
        Agent->>Agent: Construct Tactical Card (type: retirement_card)
        Agent-->>Front: Return Debrief Text + Jump-to-Replay Card
        Front->>User: Render Tactical Card
        User->>Front: Click "JUMP TO LAP 17 REPLAY"
        Front->>DB: Fetch 2024 Round 3 Albert Park Telemetry
        Front->>Front: Seek Replay Scrubber to Lap 17 & Trigger VSC Incident Banner
    end

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🛡️ Security & Edge Guardrails

SimGent uses a layered set of edge guardrails that keep the public demo resilient to API abuse and runaway token costs:

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☁️ Cloud Deployment & Cost Controls

Deployment costs depend on your individual setup. SimGent does not promise free hosting or a zero cloud bill. Your provider, region, billing plan, traffic, resource settings, storage, logs, builds and optional model APIs determine your charges. The demo’s configuration is an example, not a cost estimate for your deployment.

The public demo runs on Google Cloud Run, configured with --min-instances=0 --max-instances=1 --cpu-throttling, 512 MiB memory and one vCPU. Scale-to-zero reduces idle compute usage; it does not guarantee a zero bill. Requests, network transfer, builds, image storage, logging, and the budget function can incur charges. Free allowances depend on the billing account and current Cloud Run pricing.

The default deterministic engine makes no external model call. Optional Groq, Gemini, or local Ollama use has provider-specific quotas, billing or hardware costs. This is a Gemini-assisted build with optional Gemini integration; the hosted demo currently uses the local engine.

An alert-driven budget function can request manual scaling to zero. Billing notifications and shutdown take time: this mechanism is not a guaranteed spending cap. Configure billing controls appropriate to your account and review the Google Cloud budget documentation. Scaling to zero also makes the application unavailable until an operator restores it.

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🔌 Model Context Protocol (MCP) Integration

SimGent includes a native MCP server (mcp_server.py) conforming to Model Context Protocol v1.0. You can connect Claude Desktop or Cursor directly to your telemetry brain:

Add to your claude_desktop_config.json:

{
  "mcpServers": {
    "f1-simgent": {
      "command": "python",
      "args": ["/path/to/SimgentF1/mcp_server.py"]
    }
  }
}

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🧪 Automated Testing & Verification Suite

SimGent includes a two-tier automated testing suite: Python unit/integration checks, plus a headless-Chromium Playwright E2E suite:

1. Python Unit & Boundary Matrix (tests/test_guardrails_matrix.py): Verification of safety interceptors, weapons refusal, out-of-scope domain redirects, unsupported data notices, and deterministic telemetry calculation.
2. Headless Chromium E2E Suite (tests/e2e_playwright_suite.js): Real browser automation validating 2D Hermite spline rendering, timing tower data, multi-turn chat, antecedent pronoun resolution, localStorage persistence across page reloads, A2UI two-way action card navigation, and live rate-limit enforcement.

Audit and verification

The automated dependency audit checks the application and budget-tool Python hash locks and the npm lockfile. CodeQL, bounded fuzzing, the full integration/browser suite, Python compatibility tests, and a non-root container build/smoke test also run on pull requests. Check the current PR verification results and the audit report for evidence and limitations. A green run records those checks at that commit; it is not a security certification or a guarantee of future results.

Run Tests in 1 Command:

# Install browser test prerequisites after Python setup
npm ci
npx playwright install chromium

# Starts a temporary local server and runs Python + browser suites
npm test

Or via standard npm:

npm test                  # Run full test suite
npm run test:unit         # Run the Python unittest suite
npm run test:guardrails   # Run the focused guardrail matrix
npm run test:e2e          # Browser suite only; start the app separately
npm run test:e2e:headed   # Watch the real browser interact with the UI live

📖 For complete test matrix specifications and CI/CD details, see the tests/README.md guide.

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The Python dependency hash lock and npm lockfile provide reproducible installs. package.json is private because npm is used for development tooling, not publishing the application as a library. The container runs as a dedicated non-root user. See the build guide for runtime choices and validation.

For the remaining work and acceptance criteria, see Public beta readiness.

🛠️ Contributing & Local Setup

📋 Prerequisites

Runtime versions checked on October 8, 2026: Python 3.14.8, Node 26.11.1 (stable Current), and npm 12.2.0. Node 24.21.0 is the LTS alternative. See the Python releases, Node release schedule, and npm package. Older Python 3.10 is no longer included in the supported runtime range.

For Node tooling, use nvm install / nvm use where nvm is available, then npm install --global [email protected]. Other version managers can select the same versions. packageManager records the npm version; CI explicitly installs it.

• Python 3.14.8 recommended (full CI and Docker use this exact version; focused checks cover supported Python 3.11–3.13)
• Git
• uv for the exact-version quickstart below. Alternatively, create .venv using your explicitly selected Python 3.14.8 interpreter.
• (Optional) Node.js 26.11.1 + npm 12.2.0 (only required if running the headless Chromium Playwright E2E browser tests)

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🚀 Step-by-Step Quickstart (Tested)

# 1. Clone repository
git clone https://github.com/YangKuoshih/SimgentF1.git
cd SimgentF1

# 2. Create and activate the exact Python version (install uv first)
uv python install 3.14.8
uv venv --seed --python 3.14.8 .venv
source .venv/bin/activate    # On Windows: .venv\Scripts\activate

# 3. Install dependencies
python -m pip install --require-hashes -r requirements.txt

# 4. (Optional) Configure AI / LLM Providers
# Core telemetry and replay features do not require model API keys.
# Optional provider access has account-specific pricing and quotas:
cp .env.example .env
# Edit .env and supply your GROQ_API_KEY or GEMINI_API_KEY

# 5. Launch the local telemetry cockpit
python frontend/main.py

Once started, access the application in your browser:

• 🏎️ Cockpit Web UI: http://localhost:8080
• 📚 Interactive Swagger API Docs: http://localhost:8080/docs
• 📖 ReDoc API Documentation: http://localhost:8080/redoc
• 🩺 Health Check: http://localhost:8080/api/health

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🧪 Verifying Your Local Setup

Run the automated verification suites locally:

# 1. Guardrails & safety matrix
python3 tests/test_guardrails_matrix.py

# 2. What-If Strategy Simulator & Historical Presets
python3 -m unittest tests/test_strategy_simulator.py

# 3. Pit Wall Agent Historical Intelligence & Milestones (1950–2026)
python3 -m unittest tests/test_f1_history_agent.py

# 4. Credential & container sanitization audit (basic tracked-file checks)
python3 tests/verify_security_sanitization.py

# 5. Sessions & historical eras resilience (1950 to 2026 Grand Prix, Qualifying, Sprints)
python3 tests/test_sessions_and_eras.py

# 6. Native Model Context Protocol (MCP) server tests
python3 tests/test_mcp_server.py

# Or run the all-in-one test suite runner:
./run_tests.sh

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🐳 Running via Docker (Containerized)

If you prefer running via Docker:

docker build -t f1-simgent .
docker run -p 8080:8080 f1-simgent

Then navigate to http://localhost:8080.

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⚖️ Trademark Disclaimer & Legal Information

This repository and the hosted application at simgent.tonyyang.work are provided strictly for non-commercial educational, analytical, and archival purposes. Names and marks are used only to refer to the real teams, drivers, events and circuits.

Non-Affiliation Declaration

• SimGent is an independent, community-driven simulation and engineering demonstration project.
• It is not an official Formula 1 product, nor is it endorsed, sponsored, affiliated with, authorized, or in any way connected with:
  • Formula One Licensing B.V.
  • Formula One World Championship Limited (FOWC)
  • Formula One Management (FOM)
  • Fédération Internationale de l'Automobile (FIA)
  • Any official World Championship constructor, team, driver, or commercial entity.

Trademark Ownership

• F1, FORMULA ONE, FORMULA 1, FIA FORMULA ONE WORLD CHAMPIONSHIP, PADDOCK CLUB, and related logos, designs, and word marks are registered trademarks of Formula One Licensing B.V.
• All constructor, team, and manufacturer names (e.g., Ferrari, Red Bull, Mercedes, McLaren, Aston Martin, Alpine, Williams, Haas, Sauber/Stake, RB/Racing Bulls), driver names, and circuit identifiers are trademarks, trade names, or registered marks of their respective owners.
• The use of these names, marks, and team-inspired colors in this project serves purely to identify historical competitors, events, locations, and telemetry data points without creating any likelihood of consumer confusion or implying endorsement or sponsorship.

Data Sources and Data License

Results, timing and historical records come from two community APIs, neither affiliated with Formula 1:

• Jolpica-F1 (Ergast-compatible), whose data is licensed under CC BY-NC-SA 4.0 (terms).
• OpenF1, whose data is licensed under CC BY-NC-SA 4.0.

The cached copies in data/cache/ (and anything derived from them) stay under CC BY-NC-SA 4.0: credit the source, non-commercial use only, and share adaptations under the same license. See data/cache/LICENSE.md.

Circuit layouts:

• F1DB, licensed under CC BY 4.0: the layout raced at every Grand Prix, with its direction, length, turns and the race's fastest lap.
• f1-circuits-svg (MIT, © 2024-2025 Jules Roy, license): outlines of every layout since 1950, used where no geographic outline exists. Both are combined in data/circuit-layouts.json by scripts/build_circuit_layouts.py; see data/CIRCUIT-LAYOUTS-LICENSE.md.

Geographic circuit outlines come from two sources:

• bacinger/f1-circuits (data/f1-circuits.geojson), MIT License, © 2019-2025 Tomislav Bacinger (license).
• OpenStreetMap (data/osm-circuits.geojson: Jerez, Fuji, Korea and Reims-Gueux), © OpenStreetMap contributors, available under the Open Database License (ODbL) 1.0. The app credits OpenStreetMap on the track map when these outlines are shown. Reuse the file under the ODbL and keep the credit. See data/OSM-LICENSE.md; scripts/import_osm_circuits.py rebuilds it.

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📄 License & Attribution

The source code is distributed under the MIT License. See LICENSE.

The race data in data/cache/ is not covered by the MIT License. It comes from Jolpica-F1 and OpenF1 and is licensed under CC BY-NC-SA 4.0 (attribution, non-commercial, share-alike). See data/cache/LICENSE.md and NOTICE.md.

The OpenStreetMap circuit outlines in data/osm-circuits.geojson are © OpenStreetMap contributors and licensed under the ODbL 1.0, not MIT. See data/OSM-LICENSE.md. The bacinger/f1-circuits outlines are MIT (license).

• Built with passion by Tony Yang (tonyyang.work | GitHub @YangKuoshih).

Contributing and security

See CONTRIBUTING.md and SECURITY.md. Public seeds live in data/seed/; feedback and learned memory live in ignored data/runtime/ or SIMGENT_RUNTIME_DIR. Admin APIs are disabled unless SIMGENT_ADMIN_TOKEN is configured in the process environment. Anonymous feedback waits for admin review.