🏁 F1 Picks (2025 edition)

4-hours to improve an F1 picks game, it's lights out and away we go! 🏎️ 💨

Desktop

Background

Last year, just before the 2024 Dutch Grand Prix, I put together a quick 4-hour sprint project: F1 Picks, a simple web-based game where my family could predict race outcomes. The game was straightforward:

Each player predicts the top three finishers in a Grand Prix. Scoring is awarded as follows:

• 2 points for the correct driver in the correct position.
• 1 point for the correct driver, wrong position.

It turned into a fun family tradition. Despite some rough edges in the original build - both in aesthetics and workflow - we continued to play throughout that season and into the first half of this one.

However, since building the initial version, AI tooling has advanced significantly. Integrated agentic workflows - such as Cursor and Claude Code - along with the introduction of MCP and models like GPT-5, have completely eliminated the need for my previous manual code2prompt/ChatGPT routine 🎉. With the launch of Laravel Boost, I was also keen to explore how well it could enforce project-specific rules in a real-world scenario.

So, once again, I challenged myself: another 4-hour sprint before the Dutch GP qualifying. The goal?

• Spend some more time with Cursor and GPT-5.
• Give the site a F1 themed makeover.
• Improve the game's features and usability.
• Add meaningful test coverage to keep changes safe and predictable.

Improvements

Here's what I achieved in this sprint:

• Dependencies
  • Upgraded to Laravel 12 and PHP 8.4.
  • Integrated Laravel Boost with tailored project rules, actively used by Cursor.
• Testing
  • Comprehensive test coverage now documents and verifies all key behaviours of the system.
  • This ensures ongoing stability and keeps LLM-driven changes consistently aligned with the intended behaviour.
• Styling
  • Replaced new.css with Tailwind CSS, introducing a F1-inspired theme and fully responsive design for both mobile and desktop.
  • Added a new F1 Picks logo generated with ChatGPT.
• Features
  • Defaults homepage to the current rounds paginated listing.
  • Ability to mark drivers as inactive/unavailable.
  • Auto-selects the current round for results entry.
  • Hides sprint option from results entry unless it's a sprint weekend.