F1 Podigami

A Bayesian rating engine keeps a skill rating for every driver and every car, updated after each qualifying session and race since 1950 (uncertainty widens between seasons and when the rules change). For the next race it blends those ratings with each car’s reliability record (DNF risk) and the circuit’s character, then simulates the podium hundreds of times with a Plackett–Luce model to rank the never-before-seen trios.

It’s the overall probability that any brand-new podium trio appears at the next race — not just the top-ranked one, but any combination that has never happened before.

Qualifying is the most informative pre-race session: it reveals current pace and fixes the starting grid, whose track-position advantage has strong historical precedent. Once the grid is set, the model feeds the qualifying order through its rating engine and adds a grid-position term scaled by how processional the circuit historically is — stronger where overtaking is hard, weaker where the grid gets shuffled. In backtests, the grid-aware update places the actual podium trio in its top 3 40% of the time.

Backtested on seasons it never saw during tuning, the model places the actual podium trio in its top 3 predictions 35% of the time. F1 podiums are inherently high-variance, so exact-trio hits are rare by nature.

Each driver’s strength is their own rating plus their car’s, learned from every finishing and qualifying order — so a driver can rate higher than their recent podium count suggests when the car underneath them is quick.

Podigami blends “podium” and “scorigami” — it’s the practice of tracking F1 podium trios that have never happened before. Since 1950, 755 unique trios have appeared across 1,166 races. Today’s 22-driver grid can produce 1,540 different trios per race, so most combinations simply haven’t come up yet.

Until 1960 a driver could hand his car to a team-mate mid-race, and both were classified at the finishing position. The 1956 Belgian Grand Prix is the clearest case: Cesare Perdisa and Stirling Moss shared the third-placed Maserati, so that race put two different trios on the podium at once. Eighteen races in history work this way, and every trio they produced counts as having happened.

Four deeper dives: Combinations lists every unique podium trio in history; Overdue ranks the trios that keep almost happening; Unlikeliest celebrates the podiums that defied the odds; and Soulmates maps which drivers keep meeting on the podium.