Can you solve this computational challenge?

Are you looking for a challenge for your BSc or undergraduate students in a computational science/physics course? This one is easy to explain, but slightly more involved to solve, and anyone solving it will learn something and have fun along the way.

The challenge

You can clearly recognize the Doppler effect in the following audio recording of a Formula 1 car:

🔊 formula1.wav

Estimate the following quantities by analyzing this recording:

• The speed of the car.
• The closest distance between the car and the microphone.
• The time at which the car is closest to the microphone.
• The frequency at which the car engine is running.

You can assume that the car drives at a constant velocity on a straight line, and that the microphone is stationary.

Good luck!

Background info

This problem was originally a question in the retake exam in the summer of 2025 of the course Python for Scientists for the second bachelors in Physics and Astronomy at Ghent University. At the exam, we provided the same audio file in NPY format and broke the problem down into smaller questions.

The audio was extracted from an enthusiastic recording of a Formula 1 race (Silverstone 2017) posted on YouTube. For those who cannot get enough of the Doppler effect, you can enjoy the full recording here.

Check your results

You should find approximately that:

• the car is driving 68 m/s (245 km/h),
• the closest distance between the car and the microphone is 15 m,
• the time at which the car is closest to the microphone is at 1.6 s in the recording, and
• the car engine runs at a frequency of 337 Hz (20220 rpm).

Share your solution

If you’ve solved the challenge and have posted your implementation on-line, e.g. Jupyter Notebook on GitHub, please reply to my bluesky post with a link to your solution. I’m happy to take a look!