Lectures
What is covered, week by week, and which topics each lecture draws on.
Twelve lectures, one a week. Each adds one thing that makes a race harder to predict than the week before — a factor, or a constraint the rulebook imposes — and the argument runs continuously through them while the labs take one difficulty at a time.
Each page here is a brief overview of its week. The deck is where the week is actually taught, and every lecture has one; open it from the lecture’s own page.
Why the weeks fall in this order, and which of them genuinely depend on which, is on how the weeks fit together.
Week 1: The pit wall
What a strategist actually decides, why a finishing position is too thin an evidence base to tell them whether they decided well, and what the rulebook fixes first
Week 2: What a lap time is made of
One car alone on track, one stint of lap times, and the measurement a single stint cannot give you — fuel burn against tyre wear
Week 3: The stop — what it costs and what you're allowed
Price a complete pit stop against the laps that would have happened, then find which race strategies survive Friday's tyre returns
Week 4: The race as a loop
Turn a legal tyre strategy into a finishing time by making every lap, stop and physical-set age transition explicit
Week 5: Track position
Add fixed other-car traces to the race and watch the fastest isolated stop lose when it rejoins in traffic
Week 6: Best response, not optimisation
Replace one fixed rival trace with a response, precommit the evidence that would change the call, and defend the returned result
Week 7: The safety car
Price one lap of waiting for a possible Safety Car, reject unavailable tyre sets before scoring, and state the hazard that would reverse the call
Week 8: Weather
Compare irreversible wet-weather commitments across a supplied forecast ensemble, preserve the position-first objective, and state the downside
Week 9: Distributions
Repeat supplied interruption and weather draws to produce two complete finishing-position distributions and a fair paired comparison
Week 10: Whose race is it?
Rank the same two-car race outcomes first for the team and then for car 14, with the objective and its stakeholder stated
Week 11: The screen
One situation shown on the same pit wall twice — every quantity at full precision, then five lines and the objective named — and the measurement that separates them
Week 12: Calibration
Backtest a supplied model's P3-or-better probabilities in aggregate and by condition, then state exactly where they should not be believed