Simone Scanu is from Sardinia, lives in Berlin, and built one of the most useful Formula 1 apps available because his girlfriend would not stop asking questions during races. That girlfriend is Ciara Gillan, now co-host of this podcast. The app is Formula Live Pulse.
The origin story is straightforward. Simone was watching races with Ciara, she was curious, she asked a lot of questions, and he realised the information she wanted was either buried in the broadcast, missing entirely, or only available to those with access to the official timing systems. So he built it.
Formula Live Pulse gives fans real-time race data that the broadcast either does not show or shows too briefly to be useful — live sector times, tyre strategies, pit stop information, interval gaps, and Simone’s favourite feature: real-time transcripts of the radio conversations between drivers and their race engineers. It is available for Formula 1, Formula 2, Formula 3 and F1 Academy sessions. Within three months of launching it had passed 10,000 downloads, largely driven by user feedback that shaped how the app developed.
Simone came to development through tech journalism. He moved to Berlin for a job with the Italian branch of a tech magazine, the magazine collapsed, he stayed in Germany anyway, and taught himself to code in his spare time. He has been building ever since.
The episode also gets into why broadcast coverage still frustrates experienced fans, what data the sport holds back from the public, and why watching Formula 1 with a second screen open on Formula Live Pulse is a fundamentally different experience to watching it without one.
Download the app and try it free for seven days at formulaonepulse.com.