How a figure becomes a record

The business record holds figures and terms about the money and the contracts of motorsport. It is built so that anyone can check any line of it. This page says how.

What a record is

One record is one fact from one document: a quarter's revenue, the year a race contract runs to, a driver's term. It holds the figure exactly as the document printed it, with its unit and its period, and the document itself: who published it, its title and date, its address, and the exact words that state the figure. We keep a copy of each document's text from the day we read it, so the words can be checked later even if the page changes.

What counts as a source

• A figure is a record only when a party to it, or a regulator, published it: a company filing or its accounts, a release from the series, a team, a promoter, a partner or a buyer, an FIA document, a public body's own report. The party's own document is the truth we record.
• This version holds disclosed figures only. A press estimate or a "reported" value is not a record, however good the outlet.
• Figures are kept as printed: the same number, unit, currency and period, with brackets where the document prints a loss in brackets. We do not convert, round or add up. If a document says "multi-year", the record says "multi-year" and gives no end year.
• Where two documents disagree, both readings are kept, each with its own source. We do not pick a middle.
• A later announcement by a party replaces an earlier one. Both are kept: the later record is the current one and names the record it replaces. A disagreement is two documents about the same moment.
• A figure as first filed and the same figure restated later are both kept. The later record names the one it replaces.
• A figure from a results table is shown under the row label its release printed. A label that changes is a different row: it is marked where it changes and is never renamed to make a series line up.
• A table that a company itself presents as pro forma is marked "pro forma, as printed", with the company's own sentence.
• Where a table prints a row with a dash, the dash is kept as printed. It is not a number and is never turned into zero.
• A document that prints no date is shown with the day we read it, never as if it were dated.
• The championship's own news pages can give the date of a driver announcement. The seat, the role and the term come from the team's own document.
• No record holds a person's age, date of birth, nationality, residence or address. A sentence that prints one is not quoted.

What "confirmed" means

A record is confirmed when a second, separate check has read it against its source and found every value in the document's own words. That check ties each value to the passage that states it. A passage counts only if it holds the value and is a real sentence or table row, not a stray word. For a figure from a table, the column heading is quoted too, and the record says which column was read. An automated test then runs over every record before it is published: each quoted passage must be in our copy of the document, character for character.

Only confirmed records are public. A record that has not passed the second check is shown on no page and is in no download; where the first reading and the second check differ, the record does not appear. "Confirmed" means the document says it. It does not mean the document is right: a company can restate its own figure, and when it does, both are shown.

Not disclosed, not announced, and empty

Not disclosed means a party announced the deal and left that detail out, and we hold the announcement that shows it. Not announced is the same for a driver's term. An empty cell means only that the documents we hold say nothing on the point. We never fill a gap by arithmetic or from memory. A race contract with no end year is never left empty: it reads "not disclosed", with the reason beside it, such as the seasons the document lists.

Dates

Some records state how things stood on a day: who drives where, who a team's partners are, who owns it. Those carry an as-of date, the day the document was read, on the page and in the data. Every figure in the data files carries the date it was read.

Derived figures

A few views add records together, such as a driver's penalty points over twelve months. Those sums are ours, not the publisher's. They are labelled derived, say how they were worked out, and list the records they add up. They are never records and never appear in a download as if a party had published them.

What is never recorded

• Leaked figures.
• Betting odds.
• Salaries, and anything about private lives.
• Anything from memory, or from a page we could not open.
• Estimates presented as fact, or tables lifted whole from another publisher.

Teams, races and companies

Every team, race, driver and company comes from one table, with the names it has raced or traded under and the dates. Sauber and Audi are one entry; so are RB and Racing Bulls. A record about a name the table has not seen before is not confirmed until the name itself has been checked.

A person is in the table only as an owner or a party that a team's own document names, and by name alone: no age, no nationality, no address. A person the UK company register lists as having significant control of a team's company is named in the ownership record only, with the company, the nature of control in the register's words and the date the register gives, and nothing else from the entry. Political figures are never named, in a value or in a quoted passage. A state body or a fund is named as the body.

Some documents name an owner only by a brand, such as "Red Bull" or "Audi", and do not say which company of the group they mean. Those names are marked "brand name as printed". We do not choose a company for them.

Race seats and reserves

On the 2027 grid, "race seat" and "reserve" are our own labels, and the team's words are shown beside them. A driver is counted in a 2027 race seat when the team's own document places the driver in its 2027 line-up, or names the driver, the team and a contract end year of 2027 or later. A seat that rests on an end year carries an as-of date: the day the team's own news was last read for anything later, such as a departure or a replacement. A deal of more than one year with no year given is listed as "under contract, term not stated" and is never counted as a confirmed 2027 seat. Reserve, test and third drivers are listed apart and are never counted among the 22 race seats.

Our automated reader

FlagAndClockBot is the automated reader that fetches the source documents for these records, one page at a time. It follows each site's robots.txt rules and does not go where a site asks automated readers not to. If it is reading your site and you would like it to stop, tell us through the contact page.

Changes

A record is never edited in silence and never deleted. Each one carries its own history: when it entered the record, when it was withdrawn, and when it came back with a value changed. The change log prints that history, newest first.

Licence and how to cite

The records, the downloads and the data files are free to reuse under Creative Commons Attribution 4.0, with credit and a link. The notice says what is covered. Each dataset page gives a line to cite it by. The passages quoted from source documents are their publishers' words. When a figure matters, cite the original document as well as this record.

The results, standings and calendar tables under Data come from other sources and carry their own licences. They are not part of the business record and are not in its downloads.

How to report an error

If a record does not match its document, or a newer document replaces it, write to editor@paddocknotes.net with the record's id (it is under "Quote and details" on every row) and the document that shows the right figure. We re-open the source. If the record is wrong it is withdrawn and the corrected record replaces it, and both steps appear in the change log. A figure we cannot tie to a document a party or a regulator published will not be added, whoever reports it.

How it is made

The records are drafted and checked with AI tools working to these rules, with the drafting and the checking kept apart, and an automated check on every change. How this is made covers the site as a whole.