Release v3.4.0

New Features

• Added support for Numpy v2.0.

• Completely reimplemented the fastf1.plotting module. The new module
  provides a more flexible and powerful API for creating custom plots. This
  is an overview of the relevant new features and changes:

  • Driver and team names, abbreviations and colors are now supported for
    all seasons since 2018 instead of only for the most recent season.

  • Driver changes and test drivers running in free practice session are now
    supported automatically and do no longer require an update of FastF1.

  • Users can now choose between the "offcial" F1 color map and the color map
    that was already used previously by FastF1.

  • Driver specific colors are deprecated. Users are encouraged to use more
    visually distinct plot styling options instead to differentiate between
    drivers of the same team. The new
    fastf1.plotting.get_driver_style function can be used to easily
    get driver specific styling options.

  • Users can override team colors and short name constants on a per-session
    basis.

  • The API has been improved to be more consistent and easier to use.

• Added support for a fallback mirror for the F1 livetiming API. If the primary
  API is unavailable, FastF1 will automatically switch to the fallback mirror
  and continue to work without any user intervention.
  This feature is experimental and for now provided without any guarantees.

• Added a warning that informs users when event, driver or team names are
  fuzzy matched. (by @Casper-Guo) (#574)

• Improved fuzzy matching of event names to give better matching results. (by
  @Casper-Guo) (#579)

• The SignalRClient can now be started when an async event loop is already
  running by awaiting the new
  fastf1.livetiming.client.SignalRClient.async_start coroutine. This
  enables usage in newer versions of Juypter Notebooks, for example.

• Set a default connection timeout of five seconds for all requests to the
  Ergast API. This should prevent long data loading times when the API is
  unresponsive.

Bug Fixes

• Drivers that crashed on the very first lap are now assigned NaN as their
  position, ensuring correct positions throughout the field at then end of the
  first lap. (by @AND2797) (#595)

• Fixed a bug that prevented loading of any data when driver information was
  unavailable from the F1 livetiming API.

• Fixed a bug in the client side rate limiting that allowed higher rates than
  intended. This may have caused the client to be temporarily blocked by the
  server.

Deprecations

• The following module level properties of :mod:fastf1.plotting have been
  deprecated:
  fastf1.plotting.COMPOUND_COLORS,
  fastf1.plotting.DRIVER_COLORS,
  fastf1.plotting.DRIVER_TRANSLATE,
  fastf1.plotting.TEAM_COLORS,
  fastf1.plotting.TEAM_TRANSLATE,
  fastf1.plotting.COLOR_PALETTE

• The following functions in :mod:fastf1.plotting have been deprecated:
  fastf1.plotting.driver_color,
  fastf1.plotting.team_color,
  fastf1.plotting.lapnumber_axis

• The argument misc_mpl_mods of function fastf1.plotting.setup_mpl
  is deprecated and will be removed in the future without replacement for its
  functionality.

• The argument color_scheme of function fastf1.plotting.setup_mpl
  will default to None in the future, meaning that FastF1's default color
  scheme will need to be enabled explicitly.

Increased minimum versions for dependencies

• The new minimum version of Python is 3.9. Support for Python 3.8 is dropped.

• The minimum versions for the following dependencies have been increased:

  • numpy to >=1.23.1
  • scipy to >=1.8.1