For years, following Formula 1 meant blocking out a Sunday afternoon to watch a race. Now, there’s so much more to it. Between Grands Prix, fans can build fantasy squads and drive the same circuits in F1 25. Plenty also dig into telemetry that used to exist only on a pit wall.
The 2026 season has given lovers of the sport plenty to dive into. A regulations reset and two new teams, Audi and Cadillac, meant no one arrived to Albert Park in March knowing the pecking order. Pre-season testing further muddied things, which sent fans hunting for data, predictions and resources to make sense of it all.
Doing the homework before a Grand Prix weekend
Race weekends start days early for a lot of fans now. They’re studying Friday practice paces and comparing tyre strategies before cars even complete a competitive lap. Community write-ups on sites like OverTake and Traxion weigh up where each car should finish, and prediction threads are up well before qualifying.
Modern F1 fans engage with the sport through racing games, fantasy competitions, and race analysis. Many also research the F1 betting sites listed on MansionBet.com to compare bookmakers covering Formula 1 markets. MansionBet works as a comparison and review hub, so the habit is the same one at the heart of this hobby: weigh options, then decide for yourself.
The common denominator here is access. Information that was behind closed doors a decade ago is now just a few clicks away, and fans want to reach the start gun already informed.
Fantasy, turning every session into a decision
F1 Fantasy is the simplest way to start being more informed. It’s easy: you just pick five drivers and two constructors under a $100 million cap, then score points off real race results. Two free transfers each round allow you to react to form or a crash in final practice.
The 2026 edition loosened a few rules too. All three of your teams can now place in the global league. Net transfers mean swapping a driver out and back no longer costs twice, and the Sprint DNF penalty dropped to minus 10. Six one-use chips, including Wildcard and Limitless, still exist for timing your bigger moves.
If you adopt one tool, make it this one. It’s the cheapest entry point going, and it changes how you watch F1, because a dull midfield qualifying lap can now directly impact your standings. Fans who want an edge lean on F1 Fantasy Tools, which simulates the best squad for a given budget, or Fantasy GP, which has fielded its own version since 2009.
Driving the grid yourself
Fans don’t only watch the circuits now, they also drive them. Through EA Sports’ F1 25 you can race the 2026 grid, including Audi, Cadillac and MADRING, the 5.4 km Madrid track that’s the first new venue on the calendar since 2023.
Codemasters broke a 16-year run of annual releases this year. Instead of an F1 26, the studio released a paid 2026 Season Pack and is saving a rebuilt game for 2027. Player counts still shadow the real sport: F1 25 set a Steam record near 17,000 concurrent players around the Abu Dhabi finale, with Norris and Piastri locked in a title fight.
The most committed sim racers are turning to iRacing or the fast-growing Le Mans Ultimate. F1 even stages its own Sim Racing World Championship with official teams behind the wheel. The game lets you download the setups behind record laps, like the 1:41.306 Otis Lawrence holds at Spa.
Telemetry for the rest of us
The types of numbers fans can access now would have been locked away 10 years ago. Open-source projects revolutionized this though.
FastF1 – a free Python library – takes lap times, tyre data and full telemetry straight from F1’s timing feed, down to the speed, throttle, brake and gear traces on a single lap. The OpenF1 API does much the same, serving car data at a 3.7 Hz sample rate and refreshing gaps to the leader every four seconds.
Web apps like F1 Tempo and TracingInsights can be added to these, letting anyone compare two drivers’ laps without writing any code. Fans have turned the same feeds into everything from championship-permutation calculators to LED strips that trace a circuit in real time.
None of this replaces the race. But it does mean that by the time the lights go out, you’ve got a good chunk of fans who have a pretty clear idea how the race will unfold already.