[ENH] 2024 team colors

[formulatimer]

Proposed new feature or change:

Since version 3.3, the colors for AlphaTauri and Sauber have not been available, causing errors in ff1.plotting.team_color() for the years 2023, 2022, 2021, and so forth.
I have read the release document for version 3.3, and you are aware of it. However adding the colors for AlphaTauri and Sauber resolves the issue, and the year 2024 is not affected.

Here, I present my proposal, which is very easy to implement:

TEAM_COLORS = __TeamColorsWarnDict({
    'mercedes': '#00d2be', 'ferrari': '#dc0000',
    'red bull': '#fcd700', 'mclaren': '#ff8700',
    'alpine': '#fe86bc', 'aston martin': '#006f62',
    'sauber': '#00e701', 'visa rb': '#1634cb',
    'haas': '#ffffff', 'williams': '#00a0dd',
    'alfa romeo': '#00e701', 'alphatauri': '#1634cb'
})

[pesaventofilippo]

I don't really agree with this change. The problem is, "Visa RB" and "AlphaTauri" are the same team, so they have the same color. But the color for this year's RB is different than last year's AlphaTauri, so if you want to use colors for the last season, the AlphaTauri color would be wrong. Same for the Sauber/Alfa Romeo team.

And the same goes for all the other teams: they are correct colors for this season, but for the 2023 season and back, they are wrong colors, even if the team name didn't change. So, for this reason, I think it's actually best to only support the 2024 season instead of technically supporting the previous seasons with wrong colors, at least until we figure out how to automatically generate colors (see #480 and #218)

[theOehrly]

Only the two renamed teams changed their colors, no? Yes, I modified other colors as well, for readability. But they are still valid for last season. So technically, this might work.

But I'm unsure whether this change might have unintended consequences. It might cause some confusion/problems, having team names in there that aren't from the current season. Even if it is not a problem in FastF1, users might rely on the fact that only the current teams are listed there. Therefore, I went with the option of breaking last season in favour of expected behaviour for this season, where most analysis will be done at the moment.
Proper support for multiple seasons isn't that far away anyway.

[pesaventofilippo]

Only the two renamed teams changed their colors, no?

Actually no, if you get the teams' colors from the livetiming API, many teams have changed, if not all. For example, Ferrari has changed even if the livery is quite similar. Williams, Alpine and others also changed (Alpine is pink now, I'm not sure if it will revert to a shade of blue after the first races)

[theOehrly]

Yes, but I'm not using the official colors anyway. There's a good reason for that too. They are using slightly muted colors in their color scheme and although kind of nice, the contrast is worse in plots, meaning that readability suffers. I also made Red Bull yellow now, after all, it's one of their contrast colors and makes them much easier to distinguish from the other blue teams.

(There will be an "official" colormap as alternative in the future if you really want the official colors)

[formulatimer]

I have changed the plotting.py file in my computer. I just opened the issue because I thought it could be interesting for other users.

Feel free to close the issue

[theOehrly]

As of v3.4.0 and #585, team colours are now properly supported for all seasons since 2018.