Sources and licences
Sources and licences
Every table under /data/ names its source, its licence and the time it was fetched, in the page footer and in its JSON. This file is the full list: what each source is, the terms we read before using it, and the series we have not built and why. Facts such as a finishing position are not copyrightable, but a database can be, so Flag & Clock stores its own normalised tables built from a source's answers, never a mirror of the source.
Terms were read on 21 October 2026. If a source changes its terms, the fetcher for it stops until this file is updated.
In use
| Series | Tables | Source | Terms | Licence of the PN table |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Formula 1 | standings, results, calendar | Jolpica-F1 API, the community successor to the Ergast API | TERMS.md: free for non-commercial use; data licensed CC BY-NC-SA 4.0; commercial use by arrangement with [email protected]; rate limits 4 a second, 500 an hour | CC BY-NC-SA 4.0, inherited from the source |
| World Rally Championship | standings, results, calendar | Wikipedia, "2026 World Rally Championship" | Wikimedia Terms of Use; text is CC BY-SA 4.0; access by the API etiquette | CC BY-SA 4.0, inherited; each file names the revision read |
| World Endurance Championship | standings, results, calendar | Wikipedia, "2026 FIA World Endurance Championship" | as above | CC BY-SA 4.0, as above |
| MotoGP | standings, results, calendar | Wikipedia, "2026 MotoGP World Championship" | as above | CC BY-SA 4.0, as above |
| Formula 1 race-weekend hubs | /f1/<season>/<event>/ (Las Vegas GP first) |
Jolpica-F1 API for the schedule and results; the Wikipedia circuit article's infobox for lap length, turns and opening date | as above, for each | CC BY-NC-SA 4.0, because the Jolpica parts are non-commercial; the circuit facts are credited separately on the page |
| Driver ladder | driver moves | Flag & Clock' own weekly driver ladder brief; each move checked against the team, series or publication named | Our own compilation | CC BY 4.0 under the Flag & Clock data notice |
Formula 1 notes
- The F1 tables are share-alike and non-commercial because the source is. They are not covered by the CC BY 4.0 notice that applies to Flag & Clock' own datasets, and each F1 page and JSON file says so.
- Flag & Clock carries no advertising today. If the site starts selling advertising, sponsorship or paid access, the F1 tables need either written permission from Jolpica for commercial use, or a move to the Wikipedia season article (CC BY-SA 4.0 allows commercial use), built the same way as WRC.
- About ten requests a run, a third of a second apart, with a named User-Agent.
Why Wikipedia for WRC, WEC and MotoGP
Every official results source for these series forbids reuse in its terms, so we do not use them, and we do not work around a block:
| Source | Clause that rules it out |
|---|---|
| wrc.com (Red Bull Media House) | Terms, item vii: no spidering, harvesting, scraping or crawling |
| fia.com documents and results (all FIA championships) | Website terms, cl. 3.5 and 3.9: no reproduction or use of information or data without the FIA's prior written consent |
| ewrc-results.com | Serves a bot challenge on every page; its robots.txt reserves rights against text and data mining under Art. 4 of the EU copyright directive |
| fiawec.com | Legal notice: reproduction not permitted beyond personal viewing |
| Al Kamel timing (WEC and IMSA classifications) | Results site notice: data wholly owned by Al Kamel Systems; distribution by third parties "will lead to legal action" |
| motogp.com and its results API | Legal notice: personal use only; content may not be copied or transmitted "for profit or free of charge" |
Wikipedia's season articles are openly licensed (CC BY-SA 4.0, commercial use allowed with attribution and share-alike). Each run makes one request per article through the MediaWiki API with a named User-Agent and maxlag, keeps only the facts the table needs, and records the revision id. Two guards protect accuracy:
- Shape: standings must parse to at least three rows with points in descending order, or the run fails and the last good file stays.
- Cross-check: where Flag & Clock' own results ledger (compiled by the newsroom from official classifications) has standings for the same round, the leader and their points must match the article. On 21 October 2026 all three matched: WRC after round 13, WEC after round 7, MotoGP after round 17. A mismatch stops the write.
Not built, and why
| Series | Reason |
|---|---|
| Formula E | fiaformulae.com terms: personal non-commercial use only; robots.txt disallows /api/. The 2025-26 season ended in August. Buildable from Wikipedia the same way as WRC when a season page is current. |
| IMSA | imsa.com serves a bot challenge, so its terms could not be read; we did not work around it. Results PDFs are Al Kamel's (see above). Buildable from Wikipedia. |
| Formula 2 | fiaformula2.com terms: no distribution, copying or extraction. Buildable from Wikipedia. |
| IndyCar | Not a Flag & Clock series (_race_calendar.json has none). indycar.com terms also forbid scraping. |
| Wikidata (CC0) | Checked as a public-domain option: the 2026 season items hold season metadata only, no standings or results. |
Driver moves notes
- Only rows the brief tags as primary-verified are published. Reported, single-source and pending moves stay out. Briefs before late July 2026 did not tag rows, so their moves are not yet in the table; a verification pass over them would add them.
- The briefs live in Google Drive on the editor's Mac, so this table refreshes when the update runs there. Elsewhere the committed file is kept as it is.
Decisions on record
- 2026-10-21: Eli accepted the split. WRC, WEC and MotoGP come from Wikipedia under CC BY-SA 4.0. F1 comes from Jolpica under its non-commercial terms for now, and the F1 pages say so. Flag & Clock' own data (driver moves, the title arithmetic) stays under CC BY 4.0. The carve-out is in public/data/LICENSE.txt.
- A request for commercial terms is drafted for Eli to send to [email protected]. Until Jolpica answers, the F1 tables stay non-commercial. If they refuse, F1 moves to the Wikipedia season article, built the same way as WRC.
Attribution and change notes
Every table's JSON carries licence.attribution and, where the source licence is share-alike, licence.changes. The page footer prints both. CC BY-SA 4.0 and CC BY-NC-SA 4.0 require a reuser to credit the source, link the licence and say whether the material was changed (section 3(a)(1)). The change note states what Flag & Clock did: it extracted and normalised the facts and computed its own figures, and it did not copy the source's prose. Anyone reusing a Flag & Clock table should keep both lines.
Flag & Clock' own figures
The gaps to the leader, wins counts, season grids and title arithmetic are computed by Flag & Clock from the tables above:
- points still available;
- who can still win;
- the earliest round the title can be settled.
The title arithmetic uses each series' published points rules:
- F1: 25 per Grand Prix win and 8 per sprint win, with no fastest-lap point;
- MotoGP: 25 per Grand Prix win and 12 per sprint win;
- WEC Hypercar: 25 per six-hour win plus 1 for pole, and more at longer races, as the season article's points table states.
The method is in scripts/data/lib.mjs (titleRace). As figures, these are covered by the same licence as the table they sit in.
Field notes
fetchedAtis the time of the fetch that last changed the table. A run that finds nothing new leaves the file, and its timestamp, alone, so an unchanged table never triggers a deploy.dataAsOfnames the last round the table includes.source.revision(Wikipedia tables) is the article revision read;source.checkrecords the ledger cross-check result.- Results are as classified when fetched. A later steward decision or appeal changes the table on the next refresh after the source records it.