The F1 calendar integration in Home Assistant gives you session state — but only after a delay and without fine-grained race status. This post covers a small Node-RED flow that polls a public F1 status API every 30 seconds and maps race conditions to Govee light modes via govee2mqtt.
Green means go. Yellow means virtual safety car or safety car. Red means red flag or session stopped. The lights update within 30 seconds of the actual on-track event.
The trickiest part was handling the transition from qualifying to race day — the session entity changes ID between sessions, so the automation needed a template to resolve the current session entity dynamically.