I will say it again: Motorsports is pro-peace and anti-war!

Oh well. Maybe next year.

I hope Lance has a great time. I am so here for stressed out F1 drivers teaching the world about the joys of sports car racing.

Argentina’s plan for a new grand prix — presumably what this is all ultimately about — is getting pretty real, and Franco will be doing one of those vintage F1 street drifting shows in Buenos Aires in April to hype it up. These moneyed interests would prefer Colapinto not get involved in things like the Suzuka incident while all this is going on, not with the way Argentine sports fans are. Too late, though. Now Alpine has to post unhinged 1,200-word social media statements promising they aren’t sabotaging Franco’s car.

There may not be any world-renowned drivers left, but the racing is always pretty good. At least there is a way to watch it.

Welp. He’s out again. He will be replaced — at least temporarily — by Barclay Nettlefold, CEO of Racing Australia Consolidated Enterprises (RACE), the group that owns Supercars. I eagerly look forward to hearing more about what’s going on.

Anyway, the car will make its racing debut at the FIA WEC season opener, the 6 Hours of Imola, from April 17–19.

Lime Rock rules, but it’s quite short at 1.53 miles, so it’s hard to fit the grids of well-heeled championships there. I think it’s a fantastic sign for the health of U.S. racing that Lime Rock is finding a niche as a place where awesome mid-tier series like MPC and the NASCAR Truck Series can become headliners.

This whole incident unfolded exactly as it should. NASCAR blocked him from competing until they saw what his employer would do, and as it is fundamentally an HR issue, they let the team handle it. Now NASCAR can return to a neutral position knowing full well this idiot will not get back into NASCAR racing with any grown-up operation.

I love short-track late model racing. I would watch it pretty much anywhere, and I have watched probably a dozen CARS Tour races hoping they’re going to be great before giving up. The (relatively) high profile of the series has created so much thirst around it, and what all that has led to is fields packed full of moronic drivers trying to prove something. I don’t think I’ve watched a single event that didn’t end hours late because of endless cautions.

But last weekend’s CARS Tour race at Wake County Speedway — which I did not watch — sounds like it was on another level entirely. Basically, take the normal out-of-their-minds CARS Tour drivers and throw in the series utterly bungling the fuel requirements of the event, and you get this generational tirade from Landon Huffman, who won the race.

It’s based on the Mk3B that won the 24 Hours of Daytona in 1969, but instead of being made of fiberglass, the bodywork is a demonstration of a new process Lola is calling the Lola Natural Composite System (LNCS). It has been granted an FIA passport making it eligible for historic racing (despite having a contemporary Chevrolet V8 inside), and there will be 16 road-legal versions sold to the fabulously wealthy as well.

This weekend’s Phillip Island SRO opener had all the usual SRO sports car classes driven by a mix of extremely eager aspirants and Supercars drivers, but to me what stole the show was the debut of Mustang Cup Australia (which also featured several Supercars drivers). I challenge anyone to come up with a more dramatic first-ever race of a new championship than this one:

This is Cameron passing Golding for the win, +0.006

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— Jon 🛞 (@jon.turningfortune.com) Mar27, 2026 at 9:42 PM

Seeing that ending does not spoil it, of course, because it was a coin flip. Watch the whole thing.

The three-hour opener of the top-class GT World Challenge America was won by the JMF Motorsports #34, a Mercedes-AMG GT3 customer team fielding Michai Stephens and a Mercedes driver with whom you may be familiar named Mikael Grenier. This team and car has been dominant at Sonoma the past couple years, but this was the beginning of the three-hour GTWC America race format, and the #34 proved they can keep going all day if they have to.

The other big story to my eye is that Westin Workman and Tyler Gonzalez are absolutely unstoppable in their #68 GR Supra in Pirelli GT4 America. It’s worth watching those races just to see if anybody’s got anything for them.

Short-track legend Lee Pulliam is one of those guys who spent his career working on racing instead of schmoozing and therefore never got a big break. Dale Earnhardt, Jr. cannot resist such a story and gave Pulliam a great Martinsville car, and Pulliam almost pulled it out. He led confidently throughout the race, but the unfamiliar equipment got the better of him. He missed shifts and spun wheels on restarts, eventually making the wrong kind of headlines by stacking up the field into a huge wreck. Don’t let that overwrite the fact that he got a top-five finish and took responsibility for the mistakes, which is a good teaching for O’Reilly Series drivers. Pulliam’s teammate, Justin Allgaier, pulled out another win. He really is the last of the Busch Series legends.

As for the Cup race, here are my headlines:

• Shane van Gisbergen qualified fifth. Get your affairs in order, Cup drivers.
• Chase Elliott got a win so early in the season that he surprised himself. It is very interesting to see him have an upturn in results now that people actually have to run consistently all year, because last year he showed that few of them can do that as well as he can.

• The drivers have warned the whole time that the speed differentials caused by regeneration would lead to bad wrecks, and that did indeed happen in Japan. Thank God, Ollie Bearman is okay after a terrifying crash trying to avoid Franco Colapinto’s crawling Alpine. It should not have gotten to this point. That said, there are procedural ways to rectify this; it doesn’t prove regenerative braking is some fundamentally bad idea.

• Qualifying did borderline suck this time. The tweaks to regeneration capacity were not enough. The cars need more power in qualifying — from the V6 — and I hope they get it over the war-induced break. Charles Leclerc has toed the line for the first couple races, but this time he snapped because he tried to do what Charles Leclerc does — hurl the car in qualifying — and the car would not let him.

• It’s beginning to seem like some sources were misleading about how much of this new stuff is under manual driver control. I don’t think I’m alone in having been given the impression that drivers would be able to manipulate this stuff to extract the maximum from it, but it’s starting to come out that — at least the way some teams have chosen to implement things — the computer is taking the car out of their hands from time to time, sometimes at unconscionable moments. To the extent I am susceptible to turning against these regs, it is here: If the driver makes control inputs that the car does not obey, and there’s nothing broken, that’s unacceptable.

• That’s all the bad stuff. Racing at Suzuka is back. People who think the only legitimate form of passing is out-braking someone need to get over it. People who believe overtakes no longer require any skill or setup are just wrong. This is a new kind of F1 racing. The yo-yo part is not the pass. It can take several laps to determine whether a pass has been completed or not, and that is awesome. Think about how much of the Japanese Grand Prix in recent years was devoted to nothing happening. Now you have to watch every lap in order to see whether what looks like what’s happening is really going to happen or not. Stakes!

• Max Verstappen is annoying and whiny, but it’s still good for the sport that he’s throwing a tantrum. It’s the strongest leverage available against FOM and the FIA for the drivers to fix what is really wrong with the regs (they won’t be able to change the things they personally dislike but are actually good).

• Cars being unreliable is good, actually, and so many people I see online complaining about it were — just before this season started — talking about how boring F1 is now that the cars don’t blow up anymore.

• Even if not a single team can get close to Mercedes this year — and of course they will — Kimi versus George is going to be one for the ages.

Honestly, this probably accomplishes the brand objectives of this partnership better than selling the chocolate ever possibly could, and the PR statements are all too knowing about it. Maybe it was staged.

Posavac posted on social media that he would enter a Z4 in the N24 this year if the post got 5,000 likes, and I salute the internet for making it happen.

There is too much choking in the pits in this championship

— Jon 🛞 (@jon.turningfortune.com) Mar29, 2026 at 2:46 PM

I was glad to see Graham Rahal get a good result because it gives me hope for the RLL resurgence; the series needs another competitive team, and Mick Schumacher needs a competitive car. Mick is clearly taking some time to bed into IndyCar, but I continue to believe he can get his sea legs.

I am beginning to worry about Will Power, but I will keep the faith.

Man, I am going to miss looking at this thing. I guess I should see if any diecasts are available.

Can I have it when you’re done

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— Jon 🛞 (@jon.turningfortune.com) March27, 2026 at 10:24 AM

I don’t want to give Max Verstappen credit for everything, but there sure are a lot of teams bringing cars to the N24 this year to try and beat him.

One wonders why this was kept under wraps instead of being loudly communicated, especially during F1’s whole “ahead at the apex” Max Verstappen dive-bombing era of the past couple years. Those controversies frequently ignited discourses about officiating standards and stewarding experience and that sort of thing. You’d think the FIA would have wanted to get out ahead of that by crowing about this upcoming program. It might even have headed off that shouty letter from Formula E drivers last week.

We will shortly find out what it has taught Baldwin, as he will make his O’Reilly Series debut at Martinsville this weekend.

The NASCAR media scene did itself and the few people who pay this much attention a disservice by overhyping the potential impact of the new high-falloff tires and higher horsepower package at Darlington. They created some expectation that the Cup race would be an all-timer. It wasn’t, but it may have been something better in the long-term, which is a regular old race at Darlington.

In fact, all three series had good Darlington races. Corey Heim stole the Truck Series race from Ross Chastain in a very exciting finish, and Justin Allgaier stole the O’Reilly race from Kyle Larson, which one always loves to see.

What was great about the Cup race was that the best car won. It was no lottery, but it was certainly a trial. The cars were a handful for everybody, but Reddick suffered electrical problems and had to go and win the hottest race of the year so far with no way to cool off. Mike Joy called the win in a pretty funny way, saying Reddick had returned to winning “after a two-race losing streak.” That’s four on the year, if you’ve lost count.

It was an exciting day for RFK — Keselowski, Buscher, and Preece were all top-five runners throughout the day, they combined to lead 183 laps, and Brad won stage two — but they couldn’t hang on. You’ve been able to see them coming for a couple races at this point, though, so I think there’s more to come from RFK this year.

Also of note was Carson Hocevar, who got his best Cup finish ever in his best livery ever, a very well done Chili’s-sponsored Dale Earnhardt Wrangler car throwback. Hocevar finished fourth, and teammate Daniel Suárez finished seventh. So look out for Spire, too.

Rovanperä’s overall open-wheel trajectory has been sensible, but it has gone a little strangely. He got started in the well regarded Formula Regional Oceania championship over the winter, though he didn’t achieve many notable results, and he had to miss the final round due to — yes — illness. The plan was always then to enter Super Formula, but he has told reporters that this was the requirement of his minders at Toyota rather than his own initiative.

Super Formula is a very high-level series, of course — both Pierre Gasly and Liam Lawson had strong showings there prior to getting their Formula 1 rides, and Álex Palou did a turn there as well — but it’s certainly a bit more out-there of a choice for a Formula 1 aspirant than, say, Formula 2. It makes sense if you’re Toyota, though. But the latest development is the weirdest of all: The announcement of Rovanperä’s withdrawal was issued by Toyota chairman Akio Toyoda himself. It’s understandable that Toyota would take on Kalle’s career as a bit of a project given the prowess he showed in WRC, but one gets the impression that he is not entirely in control of his own destiny here.

Rovanperä’s winter testing in the Super Formula car was disrupted by issues that were reported as “vertigo,” but the vague statements imply that the current issue is a bit more significant than that. These developments have not been terribly well received by the race-viewing public, to the point that Rovanperä’s WRC stablemate, Takamoto Katsuta, felt the need to publicly defend him and continue to back him as a Formula 1 prospect.

The press release announcing this truly is a marvelous thing. It claims the new branding represents the series’ “Grand Prix intensity and global ambition.” I can translate that for you right now: “NASCAR makes people think of America, and (we believe) that dissuades Europeans from buying tickets.” Even better, they frame the decade-old category as the “ultimate stage for professional drivers in European touring car racing.”

Touring car racing?

Oh, I see. This is V8 “touring car” racing. That is, don’t think of NASCAR, the American organization that actually sanctions this. Think of Supercars, the Australian organization that doesn’t sanction this. I wonder how long the NASCAR relationship will carry on?

EuroNASCAR is already rolling out driver news with this catchy “NASCAR Euro Series V8GP” moniker, and I will give them this: If it were called the V8GP European Championship, it would be the thing they think it is. It isn’t, though. It’s the NASCAR European Series.

This event made Max very happy, of course, because instead of losing like he is in Formula 1, he got to win a race by over a minute with no competition, which is apparently very fun for him.

Unfortunately, the team won’t get to book the result because they used an extra set of tires in qualifying and exceeded their weekend limit, so the win goes to the Rowe Racing BMW of Dan Harper and Jordan Pepper. By blaming qualifying procedures, I guess Mercedes means to convey that they miscounted at that point, so they didn’t know they were short in the race. That, of course, would be publicly indistinguishable from knowing they were short and going, “Who cares? This is a test.”

Max proved his point, though: Everyone else racing in this year’s N24 should be scared of him.

Yes, it was another Porsche Penske Motorsport 1–2 with the 7 ahead of the 6, and the GTP pecking order was more or less unchanged from Daytona, but it was a bit more of a dogfight this time. Both cars had their incidents — including the 6 breaking its nose on the back of the 31 Cadillac under safety car, which would have amused me if I didn't always want the 31 to win — but they recovered through typically flawless Penske execution. Intriguingly, what decided the finishing order was actually a rather brazen on-track pass.

With just over an hour remaining in the race, the team called in a position swap because the 6 car, with Kevin Estre driving, was on fresher tires. Seven minutes later, Felipe Nasr in the 7 pounced on him in the G-loaded last corner and took the lead back, which Estre said happened because he was dutifully following team orders and Nasr was not. That is amusing to me. Good on you, Felipe. Way to get Porsche its 20th overall win at Sebring.

Porsche’s only serious challenge in GTP was again from Cadillac, with the 31 starting on pole and having the pace (and the Jack Aitken) to stay a threat, but in a heartening development for Caddy fans, the Wayne Taylor cars were finally in contention this time as well. There was a Cadillac three-ship running together late in the race that looked pretty dangerous. In fact, the 10 finished on the podium, but it was taken away in post-race tech for excess camber, which gave P3 to the 31. It is great to see WTR up there, though. They hadn’t really been pulling their weight.

There are no Porsches in LMP2, of course, but the equivalents last weekend were the United Autosports cars, who also finished 1-2. They did get a race from Spike, who was back in purple, but the AO Racing dragon-car got caught out by the timing of a full-course yellow. Tower had a pretty good race, too — which isn’t the greatest of looks for Sébastien Bourdais, who recently quit the team — but they got outdone by United on a restart. There was also some spectacularly bad driving in LMP2, most of it well within LMP2 stupidity norms, but Parker Thompson, driving the #52 in his second-ever LMP2 race, brutally murdered the DragonSpeed Corvette for absolutely no reason.

In GTD Pro, it was more Porsche, but not at all in a boring way. The winner was the Manthey #911, a truly remarkable showing even for Manthey. To swoop down upon U.S. racing like they did and then win their first Sebring is an incredible display of execution, but to do it with Nick Tandy hounding you all day in the AO Racing #77 — the People’s Porsche in this country — is all the more unlikely. So that was the other class with a Porsche 1–2. The GTD Porsches were not as dominant — particularly the Manthey #912 — but the Wright Motorsports #120 did make the podium with two overtakes in the last two laps. All that plus a superb debut of the new Carrera Cup car? Pretty good weekend for Porsche.

As for the other debutante, the Lamborghini Temerario GT3, it didn’t instantly turn around Pfaff’s fortunes, but it did finish the race! I can’t wait to see how they go on a less turbulent track.

But. The legendary GT3 drive of the weekend was that of the #21 AF Corse Ferrari. That Tony Fire cannot be stopped. After taking their lumps in drive-through penalties for racing… you know, hard, Antonio Fuoco absolutely tore the field apart to win the #21’s second IMSA race of the last three. Lilou Wadoux drove in both of those races, of course, and she was unstoppable as well. I have a new favorite Ferrari 296.

Even so, there is another GTD car upon which I urge readers not to sleep. The #27 Heart of Racing Aston Martin Vantage of Zacharie Robichon, Tom Gamble, and pole winner and Formula 1 offspring Eduardo Barrichello just went back-to-back on the podium, taking P2 in class at Sebring. “Dudu,” as Barrichello insists on being called, now leads the drivers’ championship.

In summary, IMSA racing rules.

The level of energy deployment necessary for a good race on a proper road course is made possible by Formula E’s still relatively new Pit Boost fast-charging, which I think is one of the most underrated technical developments in racing recently. Not only does it reduce the amount of in-race management, increase the strategic options, and create great mid-race jeopardy, this level of fast-charging seems among the most likely of all current technologies in motorsports to have massive consumer benefits.

Drivers

• Bill Auberlen
• Butch Leitzinger
• Roger Mandeville
• Brian Redman
• Lyn St. James
• Hans-Joachim Stuck

Cars

• Audi 90 Quattro GTO
• Riley Daytona Prototype
• Greenwood Corvettes
• Mazda RX-3

After issuing a terse non-denial yesterday that was enough for me to decide the story was at least half-true, Audi today announced a new management structure in which Jonathan Wheatley is leaving effective immediately for “personal reasons” and Mattia Binotto will add team principal — a job at which he performed not-excellently at Ferrari before joining this team — to his list of titles. There has been additional reporting to suggest Binotto and Wheatley didn’t get along, which I guess is obvious given what’s happening. Again, this sucks for Audi.

Not to be outdone, Lawrence Stroll released a goofball statement as an Aston Martin press release where he “set[s] the record straight” that Adrian Newey is his “partner and an important shareholder,” and that he’s not going anywhere, which we knew. Stroll reminds us that Aston does not adhere to “traditional” conceptions of the role of team principal (again, we know), but all this chaos and ambiguity is apparently “by design.” Then he drops the real banger, which I will quote in full:

“We are regularly approached by senior executives of other teams who wish to join Aston Martin Aramco, but in keeping with our policy, we do not comment on rumour and speculation.”

Absolutely hilarious framing. It’s not out of the question that this is all Wheatley’s idea, but what is out of the question is that Wheatley would quit his job running the Audi F1 team if his next move weren’t a done deal, so for Stroll to make it sound like people are beating down the door is silly. I did see a report that Stroll took another meeting with Christian Horner this week, but at this point I’m starting to think that’s all Stroll trying to recruit him, and he’s saying no. Never mind the fact that, to all appearances, Newey hates Horner.

Anyway, can’t wait to see how this one lands. Another enticing tidbit is that Mercedes has — magically, coincidentally, just today — promoted Bradley Lord to deputy team principal and Toto Wolff’s formal number two. I’m sure that has nothing to do with TP vacancies suddenly appearing at any brand new F1 teams.

Original post, March 19, 2:09 PM:

There is nothing surprising about Adrian Newey stepping down as big-picture boss after four months on the job. I think the Formula 1 world was too polite about that appointment. Newey is renowned for wanting to be left alone by businesspeople to concentrate on hand-drawing aerodynamic diagrams. He doesn’t want any part of the big picture. On the other hand, Aston Martin’s actual race car is such a dumpster fire that perhaps there was no one else in the organization who knew enough about race cars to fix it. There probably still isn’t.

What’s surprising is that Jonathan Wheatley is leaving Audi to do the job. The speculation is that Newey recommended Wheatley to Lawrence Stroll himself, and that makes sense. Wheatley is the man, and Stroll seemingly does not care how much of his fortune is left at the end of his time in racing. But this sucks for Audi. They are just getting their legs under them, and Wheatley seemed to be central to the project.

The letter is, well, sweeping. It criticizes the stewarding, the race direction, the rules, and even the leadership’s understanding of what the racing product is. They want an overhaul that puts people who understand Formula E racing specifically in charge, as well as better feedback and decision-making mechanisms.

And, like, fair enough. But it doesn’t seem like team management had much of a view into this move, and drivers going rogue doesn’t seem like the most likely route to professionalizing the series. What it’s gotten them so far is another round of “Formula E is a shit show” headlines.

Good examples to look out for this year: Pfaff Motorsports will introduce the Lamborghini Temerario GT3 to the world after having one last crack in the Huracán in Daytona, and yes, it will be dressed in plaid. AO Racing will bring Roxy — the pink one — to her first endurance race. And Porsche Penske Motorsport has bedecked its Porsche 963s in Mobil 1 liveries harkening back to the swirly livery of the Porsche 911 GT1 in 1996 — not the most attractive livery to my eye, but a pretty famous one nonetheless.

One other, less heralded debut at Sebring this week is the new Porsche 911 Cup car. Porsche Carrera Cup North America will run its first two 40-minute races with the Type 992.2 car, which also has a brand new Pirelli tire. There are 27 entries for Sebring. I know a lot of people don’t watch single-make series, but this is a pretty big upgrade for the Cup car, and c’mon, you gotta watch a new race car at least once.

Engine leases are a chokepoint. We don’t know what’s going on with Prema Racing, and therefore we don’t know whether one or both of their leases will be available. There seems to be some momentum on still running one Prema car with Callum Ilott, which would be nice. Katherine Legge and her devoted sponsors are wrangling for the other one, but there’s also the minor detail of a Chevy team who would be willing to run it.

On top of the 25 regular-season drivers, Helio Castroneves is back with MSR to continue attempting to win a fifth 500, and Takuma Sato is back with RLL. Arrow McLaren has confirmed Ryan Hunter-Reay in its fourth car, and Ed Carpenter will drive his team’s third car as per usual. Andretti usually runs a fourth car, and Marshall Pruett reports that people contacting the team with interest have been told the seat is taken. We can presume that’s for Colton Herta. Dreyer & Reinbold Racing intend to run Conor Daly, and Abel Motorsports hope Jacob will actually get to start this year. That would be 32, some of which are not confirmed.

Will we get to 33 with Callum or Katherine — or better yet 34 with both? Stefan Wilson and Devlin DeFrancesco are also reportedly seeking rides. The problem is the rides don’t exist. The best case seems to be 34 if Prema gets its act together and some Chevy steps up to prepare Katherine’s car.

It’s just an awesome circuit. It’s wide enough to make moves but challenging enough to make mistakes. There are rises and dips and bumps and all the obstacles a street circuit is good for. It’s in a multi-sport complex, so it seems great for access and spectators. I’m already looking forward to the next one.

And as for the racing, well, it was an utter clean-up for Andretti. Max Taylor made an excellent show of himself to win the IndyNXT race, Marcus Ericsson got his first IndyCar pole position, Kyle Kirkwood won, absolutely pouncing on Álex Palou and then driving away, Will Power got his first Andretti podium, and Ericsson finished fourth. This is all despite having an all-time classic Andretti pit stop nightmare day on every car. They really need to get that figured out.

So, we’re three races in, the championship is not already over like last year, and the first new race was fantastic. Markham will hopefully be at least close to the same level. Somehow, though, I don’t think the other one is going to meet the standard.

(Unfortunately, Bob Constanduros on the PA tried to ruin the greatest moment of Kimi’s life by announcing him as “Kimi Raikkonen”.)

This is a guess, but I’m guessing we saw teams take a bit more risk in round 2, and the increase in problems was the consequence. You just want to have a complete weekend at round 1 of a new car, and Melbourne was a particularly extreme track to start with due to its energy demands. With a little more confidence in China, teams f’d around more, and they consequently found out more.

Obviously the trophy for worst weekend goes to McLaren. Oscar Piastri hasn’t gotten a single lap in a grand prix after two of them, and this time, defending world champion Lando Norris didn’t get any, either.

Aston Martin promises they’re making behind-the-scenes progress, but we’re still getting onboard video of Fernando Alonso taking his hands off the wheel to try to shake life back into them.

Williams’ car is a total mess, which is hugely disappointing given how much they hyped up their own 2026 program, but Carlos Sainz did bag a couple points in the race.

Clearly the most famously bad weekend is that of Red Bull, even though it masks the fact that Isack Hadjar picked up four points for P8, and Liam Lawson beat him in the Racing Bulls. Max Verstappen had to retire the car with 11 laps to go, and now he hates the car and the sport and you and me and everyone.

Cadillac also showed more growing pains this weekend — including Checo crashing into Valtteri slightly on lap 1, for which he apologized — but they both finished the race, so we’ll take that!

Also highly worth mentioning is the fifth place performance of Ollie Bearman and Haas. Alpine is also apparently back in the game. Both cars finished in the points, Colapinto in P10 and Gasly in P6. Haas and Alpine — power unit customers of Ferrari and Mercedes, respectively — are the examples of customer teams who seem to have gotten it right this year.

Which brings us to Ferrari! Recall that Lewis’ only meaningful achievement in his debut season with Ferrari last year was winning the China sprint race. Well, this year in China, he finally stood on the podium of a grand prix again, and it was a seriously lovely moment with Kimi, Bono, and Lewis all up there together. George Russell was also present.

Yes, Mercedes obviously has a power advantage, but it’s no longer clear that they’re going to keep that advantage over Ferrari for long. In both grands prix and the Shanghai sprint, both Ferraris have troubled Mercedes, and while George and Kimi certainly seem happy to be driving the fastest car, both Lewis and Charles report that they’re having a blast driving the Ferrari, which is what it should be like to drive Ferraris, don’t you think?

Shanghai — in my view the most consistently underrated track on the F1 calendar — demonstrates more of what F1 cars can do than Melbourne did, and that also means the cars spend less time doing any particular thing, so there were no meaningful energy starvation problems, and everybody seemed to have plenty of juice to make dicey racing moves. I really do recommend watching both the sprint and the grand prix. Formula 1 racing is really fun again, I can’t wait for more, and it really sucks that we’re losing two races this spring due to the tragic stupidity of warfare.

Well, Ferraris are no longer enough for Tony Fire. Last year he needed to go demonstrate that he can also win in ORECA LMP2s, which he did in the Asian Le Mans Series twice, finishing P2 in the drivers’ championship. Now the Ferrari-affiliated AF Corse team, who ran the Cetilar Racing-entered LMP2 Fuoco drove last year, is putting him in the ELMS car. You see, AF Corse won the ELMS LMP2 Pro/Am titles in 2023 and 2024, but last year they slipped to a lowly fourth (though they did win the season opener). I guess they just need a little more Tony Fire to get back to the top.

Dye was on some bootleg streaming app for people who like to open packs of baseball cards or something, and he started bragging about having no idea who David Malukas — driver of the Team Penske #12 Verizon Chevrolet in the IndyCar Series — was when they met at the St. Petersburg race weekend IndyCar and the Truck Series shared. Dye then went on to perform a homophobic caricature — apparently intended to be of Malukas — for an excruciatingly long time.

Dye has been suspended by NASCAR and his team and will be required to complete sensitivity training in order to return to racing. He posted an extremely bad Instagram apology. He will be replaced in this weekend’s Truck Series race at Darlington by A.J. Allmendinger.

Bowman’s condition has still not been publicly attributed to any particular cause.

From a results perspective, it was gripping, with the lead swinging back and forth from stage to stage, eventually ending up in the hands of Takamoto Katsuta, his long-awaited first win in WRC. Everybody liked that (even though it was still a Toyota ass-whooping).

But the course was a real mess. Many tires were destroyed, many corners were destroyed by destroyed tires, whole suspensions were destroyed, whole teams had all their engines overheat because of intakes clogged with mud… and that was on the stages that weren’t canceled for being too treacherous!

Don’t get me wrong, it was a great watch, but I would not be pleased if I were a WRC team’s comptroller.

There are high-level discussions going on about the future of the event; they weren’t triggered by the craziness of this year’s rally, but that couldn’t be helping. This will be the last year the event has direct government involvement, and organizers and the series are trying to hash out what its future will look like. I hope they come up with something.

Another storyline emerged in Vegas to watch this year: Tensions between former teammates Ross Chastain and Daniel Suárez have boiled over into a face-to-face confrontation. Their on-track encounters were not terribly severe, so whatever came up clearly goes back in their history.

Well TA2 has a new name to put on your bell-ringing list: Helio Meza. He’s won the first three races this year, and he won from pole at Road Atlanta leading every lap. Watch him whenever you can. His team also has him racing in the NASCAR Mexico Series this year.

I have said my piece on the overall significance of this war as pertains to motorsports, so let’s just concentrate on the specifics of each development. There is a possibility that this unexpected break early in the season could ultimately benefit the season. The new regulations and the cars they have produced — objectively awesome though they are — need a lot of work, and this will buy everyone time. The financial hits from lost race revenue are considerable, but they aren’t game-changing, and some of the savings teams will get running two fewer races might well be.

It’s just such a tragedy that this planet is so frequently prevented from being peaceful.

What makes up for it is that Mustang Sampling is back with JDC-Miller MotorSports, who ran the Mustang Sampling Cadillac DPi-V.R that won the 12 Hours of Sebring in 2021. This will be the livery for the rest of the season (bye bye, banana boat), and they have switched the number from 85 to 5, the classic Mustang Sampling IMSA number.

Lots of people rushed to predict that moving onto a streaming service would tank Formula 1’s ratings in the U.S., but I don’t think those people quite appreciate how many people there already are in Apple’s ecosystem — and how good of new Formula 1 fans those people make. I expect the move to Apple TV to dramatically accelerate Formula 1’s popularity here, and I expect people who have gripes about it to get over it.

Anyway, MSR is running all of these cars, and I say hell yeah to that.

And don’t forget the absurd race track! Get a load of turn 10, a.k.a. “Valdebebas.”

Reporters asked BMW M CEO Frank van Meel if he’s thought about going back to Formula 1 now that Audi and Cadillac are in and Mercedes is wiping the floor with everybody. He said, “The answer is no,” arguing that, despite the obvious marketing benefits, there wouldn’t be enough relevant technology transfer to their consumer vehicles.

That’s quite a take considering that BMW M is still working very hard on its hybrid LMDh car in top-level endurance racing. Van Meel says that one is plenty road-relevant. He also, though, “think[s] this year is going to be the first one in Formula One that there’s a hybrid system,” though, so don’t assume the guy knows what he’s talking about. (Formula 1’s first year with a hybrid power unit was 2014.)

The rules on energy harvesting and deployment are among the first FIA documents to come out each race week, and they contain a few stats that make the rationale clear. One is the “power-limited distance,” meaning the amount of the lap where the cars are accelerating or at top speed and deploying electrical energy. Shanghai’s is 0.4km less than Melbourne’s despite the circuit being 0.18km longer. Drivers are on the brakes more — and harder — throughout the lap. Correspondingly, all of the recharge and deployment limits, both for qualifying and the race, are significantly more generous.

Of course, I, like many others, expected it was just an experiment, and sure enough it did not appear in Australia, but here it is. The plan is to run it in practice and then make the decision about whether to qualify for the Sprint with it.

DRR is clearly a great team for him to run the 500 with while he figures it out, and they are rumored to be targeting 2028 to get into the series full-time with the new car in 2028. He seems like a shoo-in for their veteran driver if he is able to work on the program with them starting now. Landing ARCO to sponsor the team is a pretty solid start.

At any rate, Anthony Alfredo had a pretty good run in the #48 at Phoenix before getting taken out. I would love to see Justin Allgaier get some redemption at Vegas for his Daytona 500 appearance.

Bring it on. I hope they crank up the competition in motorsports as much as they are in making good road cars that people actually want and can afford.

Nowadays, I am pursuing things — very publicly, too — that I definitely would have thought were cool in middle school but could never have admitted. I never allowed myself to explore, for example, NASCAR because it would have been deeply uncool. At our school, we made fun of NASCAR and people who liked NASCAR.

Well, now I know better, and now Jonathan Davis will wave the green flag at the Cup race in Vegas this weekend, and I will be smiling.

It would be fun to see some solid results for the Huracan in the year when the Temerario is rolling out. Pfaff Motorsports — Mapelli’s team for his IMSA endurance outings — will be debuting its Temerario at the 12 Hours of Sebring March 18–21, their goal being simply to finish the famously bumpy race.

*every hand on Earth goes up*

Max is not participating in the NLS until round 2, but his car and co-drivers will be there. I can’t wait to see how they stack up against this monster Grello duo. To be very clear, Manthey has not yet said they are sending this car to the N24… but they totally are, right?

Look, I understand why rich racing enthusiasts want to do that. If they want to race them against each other, go ahead. What I don’t want is for this GT2 spec to start creeping into multi-class sport car racing. They would be hazardous. Even if these people are rich enough to bring a pro driver along with them for a long race, the am time in a car as fast as the outright leaders — but only in a straight line — is going to be a mess.

But the next layer of the objection always seems to be that this is about marketing rather than racing, and usually they cite as evidence the fact that Formula 4 cars are not the best or most challenging race cars in the world. Well, I would like to invite such critics to race one against these women. Now that we’re enough years in for F1 Academy graduates to start forging grown-up racing careers, one after another is revealing that she is not aspiring to be an Instagram influencer but rather a racing driver.

This is the greatest such story yet, to my eye. Lia Block is doing a full American Rally Association season in a Hyundai i20 N Rally2 car, and she’s making quite clear that her ambition is to contest the FIA World Rally Championship. Her father, of course, was Ken Block, so it runs in the family. To lose your father in an off-road vehicle crash and stay on your path towards being a professional driver is no small or simple thing. She knows exactly what she’s getting into, and she intends to do it at the highest level.

Well, the first concrete step towards doing it is complete, and it’s a humiliating compromise. The circuit layout has been revealed, and rather than the promised glorious four-mile run between the U.S. Supreme Court building, the Lincoln Memorial, and back along the National Mall, it’s a 1.66-mile tootle around in front of the Capitol with seven turns, three of which are 90 degrees, and only one of which is to the right.

The minuscule course should make it easier to pave over Washington’s world-famously decrepit street surfaces, but someone in Washington will have to actually do that in order for it to happen, and that seems like a big ask. As for the racing, well, I hope you like slow corners. They should be easier to handle than normal, though, because the longest straight is a quarter mile shorter than the typical IndyCar street course, so the cars will never be going terribly fast.

So what are the bureaucratic-nightmare reasons this circuit is so compromised and the race is deeply unlikely to happen at all? Well, they’re all things we knew immediately: Racing on the proposed course would require an act of Congress to override a ban on commercial advertising, which would take a million years and probably a whole lobbying team to accomplish, there are laws in place to protect historic buildings from loud sounds and vibrations that would be hard to get around (not that I’d expect the current administration to care overly much about destroying historic things), and, well, they just can’t shut down that much city and build that much barrier in time.

I am moving my Freedom 250 doomsday clock hands five minutes closer to midnight.

I tend to use a pretty simple heuristic: Was it interesting, yes or no? In fairness, I have almost never watched a race car in motion and not found it interesting, but there are, of course, levels to this. I would put the 2026 Formula 1 Australian Grand Prix near the highest end of the highest level.

Oh, one car is way faster than the others and won the race 1-2? How interesting! They must have done a very good job at working around the loopholes in this exceedingly complicated regulation set and built the best race car possible under the circumstances! I wonder what the championship fight between the two Mercedes drivers will be like, and if any of the three other teams with the same engine or Ferraris that embarrassed them off the line at the start might have something to say about it!

Oh, a bunch of cars had serious technical problems? How interesting! As a motor racing enthusiast, I wonder if there are 1,001 or so fascinating technical stories there!

Oh, Oscar Piastri destroyed his car on the recon lap to the grid by getting on the power with his right wheels over the curb? How interesting! I wonder if there will be more mistakes that add drama to the season this year!

Oh, there was a race at the front for the first like 15 laps instead of it being over by turn 3? How interesting! I wonder if the fluctuations in energy available for overtake boosts from lap to lap had anything to do with that!

Oh, Ferrari chose to stay out when most people chose to pit under an early virtual safety car, and for some reason they aren’t apologizing afterwards? How interesting! The fan narrative that “Ferrari is bad at race strategy” might not completely explain the decision-making at the team that beat everyone else except the team with the head-and-shoulders fastest car!

Oh, Fernando Alonso had the Aston Martin in the points for a period of time despite the car being a deathtrap shitbox, Cadillac finished its first Formula 1 race ever, and Gabi Bortoleto got Audi points on debut? How interesting!

Oh, Arvid Lindblad, the season’s only rookie, finished EIGHTH? How interesting!

Oh, Max Verstappen and Lando Norris, the dominant drivers of the 2022–2025 ground effect cars, hate the new cars, but Lewis Hamilton, the most successful Formula 1 driver of all time, loves them and thinks they’re “really fun”? How interesting!

Oh, HALF A MILLION PEOPLE went to a motor race this weekend? HOW INTERESTING!

Like, come on. Yes, there are some wrinkles to smooth out after race 1 of year 1 of a completely different car. No, nobody completely understands what the optimal way to use the battery is. Yes, it is possible that some changes to the ICE/electric balance of energy output might help. So, let us sally forth into the Formula 1 season and do those things. If you’re not entertained, I dare say that’s your choice.

Do you like the new cars? That’s a different matter. Personally, I do. I think powerful electric boost and active aero for efficiency is a very interesting combination. There are some things I’d like changed, but they’re all regulatory matters.

I don’t mind the howling turbo spooling long start procedure, but I think they should be allowed to use the instantaneous power delivery of the electric motor to get off the line. Rather than have them clobber each other at the start like Franco Colapinto nearly did to Liam Lawson, have them launch hard into lap 1 with very different energy levels and race it out.

Have a qualifying mode that turns up the ICE fuel flow level or something to make the split less than 50/50. Do I care whether that power goes to the wheels or the battery? No, I just want to make sure they’re making the car go as fast as possible in every part of the track when they don’t have to save tires or race people.

That’s about it, really. The cars are clearly better for racing than before, they look and sound incredible, and personally I am more interested in acceleration than top speed or overall lap time. I go into this season as excited as ever before because even if it’s status quo, it will be better, and it won’t be. There will be massive surprises.

Frankly, I thought the NASCAR races at Phoenix this weekend were a big step down into the normal midseason feeling that NASCAR is a grind. The races weren’t bad, and the outcomes were just, but there was nothing particularly distinguished, either. I know a lot of race fans find recovery drives through the pack to be inspiring racing — and Sheldon Creed, Shane van Gisbergen, and Sunday winner Ryan Blaney all provided excellent demonstrations of that — but to me that’s of a second tier to battles of evenly matched cars and drivers on challenging tracks. Don’t tell NASCAR this because they might not agree to do these anymore, but the big March weekend at Phoenix Raceway was comprehensively carried by IndyCar.

Today just happens to be the day these lineups are coming out, but it does taste a little more delicious coming on the heels of the opening round of a Formula 1 rule set that Max viscerally hates. Don’t get me wrong, I’d like to see Max race in Formula 1 for a long time to come, but I also hope that sports car racing is increasingly where he has his fun in life.

First of all, it’s on FloRacing, which is (at least for now) the best value that exists in racing streaming services, just because there’s so much on there. The World of Outlaws series, which consider themselves the established leaders in dirt late model and sprint car racing, have their own exorbitantly priced streaming service, and Flo gives you all the same kinds of racing — with many of the same drivers — in different series, plus all kinds of other dirt, pavement, and even snow racing, for (at press time) half the price. So there’s that.

But in its own right, High Limit is just a very rewarding race series to follow. They run 64 races in a season, first of all, with many on weeknights, so if you’re someone who needs racing every night like I do, High Limit has got you. Many of the drivers are fantastic characters, and with Kyle Larson in charge on the business side, there are regular NASCAR tie-ins and crossovers.

This weekend, for instance, High Limit is in Las Vegas and scheduled around the NASCAR weekend. Not only is Larson running, two of NASCAR’s greatest villains — Corey Day and Ty Gibbs — are as well. But despite the constant presence of star power from established dirt racers and NASCAR interlopers, the series embodies its grassroots nature. There are always local aspirants and track legends in the mix, and in a discipline as instantaneous and physical as winged sprint car racing, the competition is always close.

The new Toyota is really almost there. The Walkinshaw Supras qualified near the front at times and bagged multiple top-10 results, including the Supra’s first podium from Ryan Wood.

The Penrite cars are well in it. Payne was a huge factor in the first two races, and Allen had to keep going to the back and driving back through. He surely passed the majority of the cars passed in the entire race meeting.

Brodie Kostecki won pole on Thursday and converted it into a win, breaking a six-year streak of Ford failing to win in Melbourne, and he did it with food poisoning. He only got more fearsome as he felt better, winning three of the four races and becoming the second driver ever to win the Larry Perkins Trophy twice.

Broc Feeney did win race 3, meaning Kostecki is only one win ahead of him on the year so far, and Will Brown finally poled one after flailing in qualifying for so long, but overall I come away from Melbourne concerned about Triple Eight’s form. Brown made a lot of bad moves in races and got decisively trounced by Brodie in the last one. Feeney ended up in a lap 1 wreck in the final race and for some reason kept his foot in, dragging his car around destroying everybody else around him before retiring. I sense frustration in the team.

I am certainly not concerned about the form of Supercars as a whole. They smashed long-standing attendance records on days when Formula 1 wasn’t even happening, and the overall weekend attendance was record-breaking also. I think Supercars is getting its moment of recognition on the global motorsports stage. SVG winning a bunch of NASCAR races probably helped, but the exciting Finals last year seemed to make an impact all on its own, and the series is taking advantage of the momentum.

Fortunately for the storyline, Phoenix turned it on its head. Palou wrecked out of contention early in the race, and with Josef Newgarden surging back to his traditional position at the front of any short oval race, there is now a championship leader other than Palou for the first time since the 2024 season. Palou’s incident coming up on Rinus Veekay may have been a bit of a spotter fail, and another potential spotter fail of the same nature took Will Power and Christian Rasmussen out of contention later on. All day, Rasmussen continued to earn his reputation as the craziest man in IndyCar short oval racing, and it would have been quite a romp for him if he’d been able to hang on and win.

More shoutouts are necessary. Shoutout to Mick Schumacher for qualifying FOURTH in his first oval race ever. He didn’t have a glorious finish, but he sure had a glorious start. Shoutout to Dennis Hauger for one of the best saves I’ve ever seen (seen below). And — Will Power fan that I am — I must reserve my final shoutout for David Malukas for taking the 12 car to pole. That guy really has to prove he deserves the equipment upgrade he got, and this is some pretty good proof.

I am, of course, mainly watching Formula 2 this year to see Colton Herta, and though he crashed in practice and did not amaze in qualifying or in race results, I think he did fine. In the sprint race he was aggressive and opportunistic, testing and learning the limits of the car and making some mistakes without causing any meaningful problems. In the feature, he drove more conservatively and made good choices, finishing in P7. Herta was, it should be noted, handily beaten by his Hitech teammate, Ritomo Miyata, who is the most interesting matchup with Herta on the grid in terms of prior open-wheel success.

The tenth season of Formula 2 is off to a good start. The broadcast mentioned that Lando Norris is the first F2 graduate to become F1 world champion, which blows my mind.

Nothing has overtly gone belly up yet, but I certainly haven’t heard anything about the racing; in fact, this story here is the first thing I’ve heard about how it’s going. Answer: terribly. The guy appears to manage like a tyrant, and he’s quickly running out of people to run this thing for him.

Iron Dames is reorienting itself as a more open-ended support system for getting more women into motorsports, rather than a race team with cars for women to drive, and some may see this as a defeat, but I think it’s a good call. That program was too rigid to get solid, lasting results. It was a box into which everything had to fit, rather than an adaptable team that could draw together the right drivers, the right car, and the right program. The drivers were top-notch; that wasn’t the problem. The problem is that the best women in racing should be seeking the best seats in racing, and the movement supporting them should be helping them do that rather than spending all its resources trying to go racing all by itself.

In Melbourne, it looks like teams are settling on a big super-clip (full blast of battery recharge with full throttle while slowing) into turn 9 as the bit of track they have to sacrifice in order to accelerate with full power on the next straight and make it to the other side. It’s the sort of thing purists were worried about, and I’ve seen some complain about how it looks through practice, but as Juan Pablo Montoya reported trackside on the broadcast, the acceleration after that is mighty impressive. I’ll withhold an opinion on whether that’s worth it and say we’ll find out in qualifying.

In general, every team and every driver looks to be where I’d expect them to be at this point with the exception of Aston Martin, which we knew was in trouble before the circus got to Australia, but things seem to really be crumbling now. A blame game has started (Newey is pinning it all on Honda, of course), the engine is shaking the hybrid system to bits, the drivers’ health is at risk from the vibrations, and it looks likely they may retire by choice before much of the race is even complete.

It’s not all Honda’s fault, of course; Aston sounds like they were taken by surprise by the total brain-drain of Honda people who worked on the Red Bull program, even though this is how Honda has always worked. Arguably it’s why Honda’s F1 history is so messy, too, and it’s repeating itself here, and Aston Martin was not ready for it.

Honda sends people to F1 to train and bring that wisdom to other parts of the company. This is also Toyota’s approach to Formula 1, but that’s why their arrangement with Haas is so carefully constrained, and it doesn’t even include the power unit, which is provided to Haas by Ferrari. Haas, meanwhile, is putting in top 10 times in practice. Aston Martin is hardly putting up any times at all, and Lance Stroll’s fastest one so far is on trend to be outside the 107% window to qualify!

The other Ferrari customer team, Cadillac, is having more problems as we get into the real race weekend, and that should surprise no one. I was surprised things were going so well before. But nothing has happened that suggests any sort of doom. I sure would love to see both cars finish the race, though. “We’re not last” is as ambitious a first race as I could ever demand of them.

Ferrari itself is looking great, as expected after testing. Lewis is happy and actively exploring the car and the energy deployment system, and Charles was fastest of all in FP1. Both drivers’ lap times on every team are close — except on cars with issues, like that of Lando Norris — and that’s not surprising; they’re still heavily in testing mode. Mercedes seems to have turned up the wick for FP2, which put at least Piastri’s McLaren into the mix. Verstappen went off and made a bit of a mess of his car, but by and large the Red Bull power unit is humming along. Arvid Lindblad put up a P5 time in his first FP1 session as a Formula 1 driver.

Again, we’ll see how qualifying looks. I have seen enough to believe these cars can race, but qualifying is where energy starvation will make the difference between a field that makes sense and one that does not. Now, that might be fun. But it might be a mess.

This year, we’ll see their LMDh hypercar on track ahead of its racing debut next year, and McLaren execs are doing some press about how they’re justifying this effort. They’re calling it Project Endurance. They’re going to make and sell track-only consumer versions and host driving events with them, that sort of thing. Obviously this is for the mega-elite — McLaren’s GT cars were already very high-end, and this is going up-market — but maybe it’s also the kind of thing that convinces the mega-elite to stay invested in motorsports.

How did an industry that made the most famous race car drivers on Earth 25 years ago fall so hard? Well, I’m sure there is some macroeconomic explanation, but hopefully this consolidation indicates a new path forward for racing collectibles that actually takes advantage of the last 25 years of logistical advances, which have been, you know, considerable.

Prodigious racing collector Cale says:

Round 2 owns the Racing Champions brand, too, so if there is any justice in the world…

— Cale Putnam (@caleputnam.bsky.social) Mar 5, 2026 at 10:06 AM

What I want to know about Westin’s path is, is he going to Connor Zilisch his way into NASCAR, or is he going to drive Toyota hypercars in the WEC?

Their boss (trackside engineering manager) will be Grant Clarke, who was chief engineer of the NEOM McLaren Formula E team in 2024 and at TF Sport in WEC for four years before that.

Oh, no. It’s not over. On the contrary, Richard Childress is now putting him in the No. 33 O’Reilly car to race at Rockingham, having signed him to a two-year part-time deal. Notice how the press release calls him a “skilled driver and motorsports enthusiast” but a “genius marketer.” They aren’t even hiding why they’re doing this.

Of course, as a motorsports writer, Racer is also, in concept, something I really like. I wouldn’t say it’s my favorite motorsports publication across all categories, but it’s the go-to for IndyCar, and it is comprehensive, so it’s always worth sticking around. When that group acquired MAVTV last year and created the Racer Network, I thought, “That’s a good idea. Give us some racing to watch with our subscription, and hell, I’ll gladly also take your magazine.” Unfortunately, the first year of the service did not fill me with optimism about the second, and there is currently no form of racing I follow that requires me to subscribe to it, so I no longer do.

Now more pieces are starting to fall into place. An umbrella organization has been created called F=ma. It’s no DXDT, but it is at least an engineering reference that applies to motorsports, and that is the signal they would like to send. It is led by Chris Dyson, son of Rob, so, racers. Racer is now part of F=ma’s portfolio, along with PR firm The ID Agency, which represents the likes of Porsche, Bridgestone, and Hot Wheels. F=ma has now also acquired Gridlife.

This all makes sense. You can see a coherent portfolio here. But so far to me it sounds like a closed loop that will live or die on its own, rather than part of the broader racing world.

Snider drives part time in the O’Reilly series, but at the Cup race at Circuit of the Americas, he was working the lane as an assistant pit reporter for FOX Sports when he was asked to put on a fire suit and helmet, get into Alex Bowman’s car, and drive it for the final stage of the race. Bowman was succumbing to some sort of health issue — which weirdly has not been disclosed even though we assume it was just your normal cool suit problems — and he had to pull in. Snider texted a little about breaking points with friend and fellow ringer Brad Perez, jumped into the #48, and finished the race without incident.

His brother, Nick, has asked outlets to promote the Suicide & Crisis Lifeline, which anyone can call or text any time at 988.

The racing public doesn’t know much more than that, but we don’t have to in order to hold one of our own — and his family, friends, colleagues, and competitors — in our hearts.

Motor racing is one of those things. Yes, I know that fascist dictators throughout modern history have loved motor racing, too, but you know what? They lost. The periods of world war that canceled international motor racing sucked, and when they were over, societies rushed to turn their airfields into race tracks and turn the race car factories that turned into bomber factories back into race car factories. And nowadays, racing is so big, high tech, and inextricably international that I am not exaggerating when I say that I believe it could hold the world together as it tries to fall apart.

I honestly do.

So. One thing we know about Formula 1 racing is that it has lately and not-subtly become a plaything of the oil barons of the Middle East. All of the political neutrality touted by windbags at regulatory bodies can’t change the fact that the entities controlling Formula 1 — including the American company that owns it — are most definitely on A Side. I see people complain about this every day, and I get it.

But now look what’s happening.

I don’t think it’s a stretch to say that the governments of the United States and Israel are prioritizing things other than motorsports in their decision to decapitate the Iranian regime and kick off a whole conflagration that exceeds their most troubled nightmares. And their actions are now beginning to interrupt the activities of an American-owned publicly traded company that operates a sport with hundreds of millions of fans worldwide — including millions of Americans who are just getting to the party — that puts on three massive events in America, that has an exclusive broadcast deal with an American technology company that is one of the most profitable and powerful entities in the entire world (that being Apple), and whose Gulf State owners and financiers (and fuel providers) are getting actively bombed as payback for these strikes.

Which side of that do you think Formula 1 is on? Even if there are people in Formula 1 who are consciously on the other side ideologically, it is indisputable that the interest of the massive planetary industrial enterprise that is motor racing is for big international wars not to happen.

So I stand on the side of motor racing. It’s a much better use of international industry, technology, real estate, commerce, and oil refineries than warfare.

UPDATE Mar 3, 2026, 2:16 PM: The FIA World Endurance Championship has postponed its opening round, the Qatar 1812km, due to the violence in the region. The first WEC round will now be at Imola from April 17–19, and the plan is to run Qatar later in the year.

So far, the Peugeot 9X8 has been the only hypercar about which moves are being made, and don’t get me wrong, that’s a badass race car. But the Ferrari wears the crown.

Well, that said, the O’Reilly series still has some work to do. No, Connor Zilisch didn’t win, but he did beat Shane van Gisbergen to pole. That is to say, Shane van Gisbergen was in this race, and yes, he won. At one point, he passed five cars at once and flashed them the deuce as he left.

On Sunday, though, things changed.

Now, Connor was in it. He drove a great race, he just didn’t get anything to show for it because of misfortunes. He is having the rough entry to the Cup Series that everyone should have expected because he is racing with people at a much higher level than the people he humiliated in Xfinity last year.

Shane was also, of course, in it. His road racing skills have clearly benefitted the whole team; Shane is now P5 in points, taking second in stage 1 and in the final result (plus another point for P10 in stage 2), but Ross Chastain won the first stage.

Christopher Bell, last year’s winner, placed third. His teammate, Ty Gibbs, showed a compelling fourth. Their teammate, Denny Hamlin — the guy who hates road courses — finished P10, which he said afterward was “like a win” because of how resistant he is to races with right turns. That feeling, however, may have been colored by something else.

Namely that Denny is the co-owner of the car that won the race. And last week’s race at Atlanta. And the Daytona 500.

Yes, the first driver in the history of NASCAR to win the first three races of the season was the driver of the No. 45 23XI racing Chumba Casino Toyota Camry, Tyler Reddick.

ICON

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— Victoria Beaver (@toribeav42.bsky.social) March 1, 2026 at 10:51 PM

MX-5 Cup also raced, and they were fun as always, but nothing remarkable happened. The conditions were pretty wet for the first race, but it mostly just resulted in crashing rather than standout performances. Bobby Gossett stuck it out and won his first MX-5 Cup race, so congratulations to him. Justin Adakonis also got his first win in race 2, congrats to him as well. Earl Bamber did fine. Sébastien Bourdais did not do fine.

The highlight of the St. Petersburg race weekend was the first ever street race of the NASCAR Truck Series. The star studs in the star-studded lineup did make their appearances. Colin Braun finished best of the guests in P9, but he was the one with meaningful NASCAR experience. James “Jimmy Hinch” Hinchcliffe finished right behind him in P10, which was actually the most impressive drive any guest had because he was turned around by Dario Franchitti early on, then turned himself around a couple times, and he still drove through the pack. But — against what probably anybody in the entire world expected — the star of the first ever NASCAR Truck Series street race was the NASCAR Truck Series.

Yes, the regulars came prepared, and they fought it out lap after lap. It was an honest-to-god street race, and it was won in marvelous fashion by Layne Riggs, whom I used to not like, but that is now completely wiped away. He trained in the Ford Racing simulator with Joey Hand for months for this race, and it showed.

I am so, so happy to see how much the increased emphasis on road and street courses has up-skilled all three NASCAR fields.

Last year, they thought they could Mickey Mouse themselves a solution by requiring all cars to use three sets of tires — i.e. requiring them to stop twice — but as you may recall, midfield teams defeated this rule easily. They used one car to back up the pack so the other one could keep its track position in its pit stop. It sucked, and fortunately F1 realized that.

The 2026 cars are a little smaller, so maybe that will make a difference? They also won’t be suffering from the energy starvation they’ll have at tracks with long straights and few braking zones. That will create leeway to play with the rules around energy deployment, which could actually contribute to on-track passing.

Either way, the FIA has moved to end the saga that dominated preseason headlines by updating the testing regime to measure compression ratio at both cold and hot temperatures, and they’ve moved up the timeline for doing so to June 1.

The teams have unanimously approved the measure. Many of them said as the saga bubbled along that they didn’t care if it was decided one way or the other, they just wanted clarity on what was and was not legal. Now they’ll get it, and we’ll see if Mercedes can get their stuff into the window in time, but they seem to believe they can — if it was ever over the line in the first place.

I have little doubt that McLaren strung Palou along about an F1 seat that was never really his. It’s also clear that Palou and his circle flagrantly mismanaged his career at this point, and he only landed on his feet because of Chip Ganassi’s largesse — and being one of the best race car drivers in the world.

Regardless of any of this or how much it cost various parties, McLaren got to be the best Formula 1 team without Palou, and Ganassi got to be the best IndyCar team with him. McLaren’s IndyCar team could certainly use Palou’s services, but I’m sure they’ll figure things out eventually. It is water-under-the-bridge time as 2026 on-track action starts in, oh, 15 minutes as of this writing.

So they have managed to settle. Terms were not disclosed, but clearly one of them is that Palou has to say, “McLaren never misled me, they are a wonderful racing team, this was all my fault — and also there were bad, bad people around me who did not have my best interests at heart.” Even if McLaren did mislead him, it’s in his interest to get over it. That goes for everybody involved. Let’s go IndyCar racing.

Meanwhile, it’s about to be March, and we still have no idea how people outside of Japan are supposed to watch Super Formula this year.

Fernando Alonso’s life should be made into an opera. How can a driver have his career ruined so many times by one company’s engines and then agree to stay in Formula 1 until he’s 50 years old to run with them again?

Still, we need TCR as a modern path forward for touring car racing, and the FIA championship, which is the highest level of TCR, doesn’t deserve to be jerked around like this. The season is two months away, and the promoter just asked the series to move the event two months later in the season, so the series just bagged it and are looking for a new venue for their opener. They say they’ll be back in Mexico City next year.

UPDATE 2/28: I did not think of the recent eruption of state-vs.-cartel violence around Mexico as an unstated reason why it might be good to move a race weekend back a little bit, but TouringCars.net did.

She’s driving in Brazil’s Stock Car Pro Series. If you haven’t heard of it, that’s probably because you aren’t Brazilian. It’s a top-tier touring car road racing series that I would compare with Supercars in Australia. People like Rubens Barrichello, Felipe Massa, and Hélio Castroneves race in it. You can watch it on YouTube, and you definitely should.

Putting Doug Boles in charge of the series was the first sign of long-term internal harmony, to me. Doug is the guy responsible for the greatest motor race on Earth — the thing nobody around IndyCar will ever mess with — and putting the whole series under his purview is a powerful firewall. The thing is, he can’t directly handle everything both up in the suites and down on the track at the same time, so it’s important to watch how he organizes his troops.

Last year, regulation and officiating were the most obvious things to shore up, and spinning off an independent structure for that was a smart first step. Appointing overseers for it with NASCAR and FIA experience was a smart second step. Now, the issue is, the season is here, the actual officials on staff are essentially the same, and they’ve still been unable to hire a boss for them. But Raj Nair shrewdly went out in the midst of a bad news cycle and rattled off a lot of very specific observations about where the series is at with officiating, and that made me trust that they’re at least thinking correctly about what to do next.

First of all, the idea of bedding in with Prime Video makes obvious sense given how well their run of Cup race broadcasts went last year, and I dare say that if Formula 1 can get away with bundling U.S. race broadcasts with Apple services, bundling NASCAR with Amazon Prime seems like an even better idea.

But moreover, NASCAR just doesn’t have the same juice for a dramatic year-long documentary as Formula 1 does: There are too many drivers and teams, and those don’t have enough global celebrity star power pressure on them to make for off-track jeopardy, which is what DtS fans are really watching for. As followers of Formula 1 racing knows, the actual motorsports part barely even factors into that show, and the race events are basically just montages in it. NASCAR is all about the races, and that made a DtS-style silly season show rather boring.

This idea of focusing on the Daytona 500 will not only make for a better show that is more worth watching alongside a racing season — rather than instead of one, as much DtS watching seems to be done — it will do exactly what NASCAR needs to do as a sport and raise the profile of the races themselves as the centerpiece. Hopefully they’re thinking about this in terms of which race to focus on next, rather than just what happens in the same setting year after year.

Apple: “We’ll give you 💰 to let us show Drive to Survive”

Netflix: “Okay, but you have to give us a live race that’s during the day”

Apple: “K you can have the one that conflicts with the Indy 500”

Netflix: “N… no! We want a good one!”

Apple: “K bye”

Netflix: “OKAY FINE”

— Jon 🛞 (@jon.turningfortune.com) February 26, 2026 at 2:43 PM

Yeah, they have some issues with wet-weather tires, but maybe now that the floor of an F1 car isn’t a gigantic water cannon, wets will be easier to get a handle on.

2023 Formula E champion Jake Dennis has been one of the biggest prospects, as he has been rumored to be considering leaving Andretti after a drop in form over the past couple seasons. He says he was weighing multiple serious offers, but he decided to stay with the team that gave him his rookie ride. To be fair, taking a glance around the motorsport world, I wouldn’t leave the TWG stable right now, either.

And it’s clear why they want to: He’s about to go tell the world how corrupt the operation of the 54 car (driven by Gibbs’ grandson) is.

This year, there isn’t even any jeopardy; the whole field gets to start. That reveals the transparently profit-based reason this event continues. Nobody wants to have to tell their sponsors that they paid for an optional race they don’t even get to run.

If there has to be an All-Star Race, I like Jeff Gluck’s idea of having the last-place car drop out of the field every five laps until a winner is crowned.

Taking things up a notch, Spire Motorsports — a team whose whole thing is taking things up a notch — came out in the wake of this announcement to counter-announce that Gabehart works there now. So in turn, JGR amended their complaint to add Spire to it and requested a restraining order to prevent Gabehart from working there for 18 months until everything is returned and assurances are secured.

I wonder if we’ll ever find out what really happened here.

I do not find this HWA car as straightforwardly cool as rolling out a Z4 GT3 for the simple reason that this is not the real car; it’s a road-going product they’re building and selling 100 of for almost $900,000 a pop. If it does, however, rip around the Nordschleife for 24 hours, I will hop in line to praise it.

The Truck Series race was an intense and remarkably disciplined affair that was compressed for time due to weather delays, with Spire teammates Carson Hocevar and Kyle Busch working together to learn the kids a thing or two, delivering yet another truck win for Busch. They did tandem burnouts that were both 10s out of 10. There were other notable performances throughout the field, though, including an impressive recovery drive on debut for Trans Am ace Adam Andretti. Also notable was the pretty average performance of last year’s champion, Corey Heim.

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The O’Reilly Series race was utter insanity in the best possible way and probably the most awesome NASCAR race I have ever watched in real time. The question on everyone’s mind was, “How can we stop Austin Hill?” The answer turned out to be “using Ross Chastain.” There were so many great drives, but the most shockingly delightful was that of Sheldon Creed, who finally — after 15 second-place finishes in the series — got himself a win. The final laps of this race — as well as Creed’s celebration and post-race interview — are mandatory viewing.

Watch on YouTube

Naturally, the O’Reilly race was not without its stupidities. JGR crewman Alex Morgan was fully hit by Taylor Gray’s car exiting the pit box, but he was unharmed. A significant portion of the other stupidities were caused by Corey Day. My sense of that guy is that he’s a very good dirt racer who has not yet learned to stop dirt racing.

As for the Cup race, while it wasn’t better than the first two, it was an inspiring display of where NASCAR as a whole is at right now, and you can read my full race notes from the track.

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For Chevrolet’s part, some saw tapping Team 18 as the new HT as a big risk, even though Anton De Pasquale was consistently in the mix last year. Well, he won race 2, so that seems like it’s working out fine.

The Toyota debut wasn’t perfect — they had one engine go pop — but by the last race, all five Supras had finished in the top 10. Not a bad start.

There were some track surface problems that sort of screwed over the support categories, and several main game drivers got severely overheated in the last race, but nevertheless, Supercars reports record attendance, and it was a great all-around event.

Previous generations of Formula E rules have only allowed completely new homologations for mid-rule-cycle Evo updates to the whole platform. Now, instead, the series will give each team allotments of development tokens for specific systems that they can deploy as needed for joker upgrades. This is not only less expensive than having to develop and homologate whole new cars while suffering with the flaws of the current one until the Evo, it means teams will be bringing different updates at different times, which will inject some surprise into the field.

As for Cadillac, not spreading the 31 too thin is obviously a great call. Wayne Taylor is obviously behind AXR in IMSA, Wayne wants to win Le Mans with his boys, that’s fine, but more importantly, JOTA is clearly ready to do it. Concentrating all the 31’s firepower on IMSA gives them the best possible chance of toppling Penske and Porsche.

So I think Cadillac F1 has earned the right to be believed when it gives projections of its progress, and TWG Motorsports CEO Dan Towriss says the GM power unit is still on schedule for its initial goal of 2029, and he’s even making noise about doing it sooner if possible.

He was many other things, of course, including a racing driver and a successful businessman, but the aptly described “motorsports park” named for him represents something essential about the soul of racing. Motor racing has the kind of effect on people that they pour themselves into it with everything they have, building on its future to benefit not just themselves but everyone who loves it for generations to come. Barber was that kind of guy who built that kind of place.

Mount Panorama is one of those tracks that is said to supernaturally choose its champion, and in this year’s 12 Hour, the Mountain was intensely discerning, eliminating one contender after another until one of the most diamond-hard, razor-sharp entries — Mercedes-AMG Team GMR’s #888, driven by Maro Engel, Maxime Martin, and Mikaël Grenier — was permitted to win, smashing a record for how far back a 12 Hour winner had started, having come from 29th on the grid.

The Mountain is a formidable place. This is known and expected and part of racing there. It is central to the circuit’s allure. But despite having delivered the kind of brutal challenge its audience and competitors expect, the 2026 race was marred by some incidents that were — fortunately — merely horrible and not tragic.

This race is beloved for its pre-dawn start, with GT cars hauling the mail up Mountain Straight three-wide, only their headlights visible. The first hour is crowned by sunrise atop the mountain, heralding a glorious beginning to the race, unlike other day-long endurance races where sunrise provides relief from a long, dark night.

Unfortunately, at the 12 Hour this year, sunrise was more of a relief than usual. The dark beginning had been shattered by multiple wildlife strikes, most notably a collision with a massive kangaroo by the factory Mustang GT3 driven by Christopher Mies, ending the car’s debut at Bathurst after not even half an hour. The Mustang was obliterated, and the driver was traumatized and lucky to be alive, to say nothing of what happened to the tough, graceful animal.

This was an ominous beginning, and it was echoed by a later collision that could have been even more catastrophic in terms of human life.

In the ninth hour, at the end of a safety car period, the lapped cars were given a wave-around. Following this race’s procedures, that small group of back-markers dropped the hammer. They are not permitted to change position, but nor is the field held until the wave-bys reach the back of the pack; they are given the green flag when they reach the line. The wave-by cars are only given the chance to recover a lap, and in order to do that, they have to stay ahead of the leaders under full-blast racing conditions.

So the cars at the back of the field — some driven by inexperienced drivers, some in classes incapable of keeping up with GT3 cars, some slowed by damage or other issues, some as fast as the cars at the front — hurtled up the mountain as fast as they could while still driving hesitantly enough to avoid passing one another and incurring penalties. Entering the narrow and blind sections for which Mount Panorama is renowned, cars made contact, spun, slowed, and stopped.

The Tsunami RT Porsche 911, driven by Bathurst 12 Hour debutant Johannes Zelger, was turned around and stopped in a blind corner as the leaders raced towards him. It was obvious what was going to happen. Yellow flags were shown in the area, but it isn’t clear if the flag stand best positioned to warn drivers in time was doing its job. Hopefully, an investigation will clear that up. The race leader was Ralf Aron in the Craft-Bamboo Racing Mercedes-AMG, which was having intermittent radio issues, which could happen to anyone on the brutal and wild circuit. He had no idea what was around the corner.

The Mercedes and the Porsche became twisted, smoking sculptures of destruction. Both drivers crawled out of the wreckage, but Aron only made it just clear of the track before lying on his back in agony. He was taken to the hospital, and he turns out to have broken his back. Thank God, he retains full sensation and mobility, and he even wants to come back to the Mountain. The motor racing world is lucky he could have the chance.

Every racing series is an experiment with the balance between what you might call the “American style” of keeping lapped cars in the race with wave-bys and the “European style” of preserving the sanctity of race positions through incidents and restarts. The former is more spectacular. The latter is safer. Australian racing — with Bathurst as its epitome — tends toward the former. Its drivers and fans want to see a cracking motor race. International GT drivers may have American-style racing experience from IMSA, but generally they are used to the latter. This is a recipe for confusion.

At a long and treacherous track like Mount Panorama, field spread is guaranteed. It makes sense to give lapped cars a chance. But I cannot understand a rule that releases the fastest cars behind the slowest cars — who are going as fast as they can while still having to worry about staying in position — on a track with massive elevation changes, close walls, and blind curves. We may find that there were other procedural failures that contributed to this incident, but surely it would have been avoided if the wave-bys were simply allowed to catch the field before it went green. It’s a long race. There’s time.

These dangerous incidents contributed to the tension in a race that is always tense. There were many more racing incidents, questionable blocks, race-ending mistakes, and other heartbreaks. Those things are always part of racing on the Mountain. Last year, over the top at Skyline, Kenny Habul and Stephen Grove got into each other so hard that Grove’s AMG went airborne and looked for one chilling instant like it might go right over the side. Terror is a familiar companion racing at Bathurst. But both of this year’s serious incidents had an absurdity about them that suggests there should have been ways to mitigate them. I hope to see some proactive efforts to prevent the next one.

Don’t let this take away from the greatness of this race, though. The Bathurst 12 Hour still welcomes independent challengers, and they rise to the occasion and go toe to toe with the hardened pros. Such a car — the High Class Racing #86 Porsche of Kerong Li, Anders Fjordbach, and Dorian Boccolacci — started 30th, right behind the eventual winners, and finished second to them overall by merely a second. This is a glorious result. As the Bathurst 12 Hour grows into its status as a global crown jewel of endurance sports car racing, we can hope for the 2026 podium to go down as an aspirational example, even as the race’s most brutal incidents should go down as a warning.

On the other hand, I am supportive of opening up a slot on the calendar for a new race in Asia or Africa, or perhaps another rotation between such places. Formula 1 should certainly make every effort to live up to its title of world championship.

It was your usual crazy Daytona race, but this time it felt like the Daytona 500 is supposed to.

This was no fluke drive, he was right back there with Denny in case anything stupid happened, and then it did, and he drove right through it on Nightmare Mode

— Jon 🛞 (@jon.turningfortune.com) Feb 15, 2026 at 5:44 PM

Watch on YouTube

Lawrence Garrett “Cleetus McFarland” Mitchell spun and wrecked himself after six laps. He was crestfallen and contrite and embarrassed in his care center interview, and he clearly has love of the game. I’ll give him that, but what I won’t give him is how seemingly surprised he was by being taken three-wide at Daytona. The dude is just not ready for this.

As for Tony Stewart, his truck was also destroyed, but by someone else losing control next to him and sandwiching him into the wall. It was not a very good debut for the RAM/Kaulig program overall.

I was excited to see Carson Hocevar commanding the race early, but he ended up losing track position over and over again due to repeated punctures.

Chandler Smith won in a finish that was certainly exciting, but it was also goofy. They were crawling all over each other. In short, it was the Daytona truck race.

Waters/Mostert/Randle is an unfair Bathurst car

— Jon 🛞 (@jon.turningfortune.com) Feb 13, 2026 at 7:08 PM

Sure enough, they’re on pole, and there are two more AMGs behind them. That car is as much a part of the Mountain as any other at this point.

This was a blindingly fast qualifying session. Expect an amazing race.

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I love shit like this, they used to always to this type of stuff when I was watching this sport growing up so it's neat to still see it being done these days!

— Shoogy Racing 🏁 (@shoogyracing.bsky.social) Feb 13, 2026 at 2:44 PM

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Anthony Alfredo pulled it off in duel 2 but was disqualified in tech, handing his starting spot to B.J. McLeod, which we love because a significant prize money take for him could lead to more Katherine Legge drives during the season. As for Casey Mears, he was very much out until he was in, thanks to an incident that seemed dumb to me at first, but the more times I watch it, the more impressive I find Mears’ maneuvers:

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(And they’re quick, too)

Livery of the year contest gets an exceptionally strong early contender

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— Luke (@luke.turningfortune.com) Feb 11, 2026 at 6:05 PM

I would be sad about this, but Renault just seems to suck too much at management of motorsports programs, so I’ll get over their absence.

The push for the first new IndyCar since 2012 has been excruciating, but clearly satisfying the engine manufacturers was the central issue. They’ve finally done it. The new formula is good, but giving them charters to field factory-backed cars is even better. That will let Honda and GM (and hopefully some more, eventually??) have their own engineers work directly on race cars. Honda is already talking to Meyer Shank about entering the factory car with them, which is a beautiful parallel to how the MSR Acura GTP program is run in IMSA. I love this. It’s all upside.

The problem is, he absolutely hated doing it. He was miserable. He called it “anti-racing.” He also called it “Formula E on steroids,” which sounds amazing, but clearly he meant it disparagingly. He doesn’t think driving a Formula 1 car should involve this much systems management. Lando Norris, who is the reigning Formula 1 world champion, later gave a rather champion-ly rebuttal, saying he’s perfectly willing to deal with the new car given that he gets to be a Formula 1 driver for a living.

Look, I want Max to quit and go sports car racing — and I’m sure Lando does, too — so we’re obviously biased, but I’m actually glad Max is unhappy. There tends to be an inverse correlation between how much fun drivers are having and how much fun it is to watch them.

The problem is that drivers now have to rev for around 10 seconds in order to spool up the turbo to prevent lag on the getaway, since they no longer have an MGU-H to spin it up. But they also have to avoid over-charging their batteries while doing that, in addition to managing heat, dropping the clutch cleanly, and all the other usual difficulties of standing starts. Drivers are reportedly messing up one in 20 of their practice starts, which means that statistically someone will do it in a race every time. That’s not just a competitive problem; that’s a safety issue.

The thing is, there are rules changes that could mitigate the problem. I think the most promising would be allowing some battery energy deployment on the start to compensate for turbo lag, which is currently not allowed, but what the heck are electric car motors for if not accelerating!? A less invasive change would be increasing the time between the cars parking in formation and the start lights coming on. Ferrari, mysteriously, is blocking the rules changes, which suggests they’ve got a good PU solution to the turbo lag issue, and that’s fair enough, but we can’t be having crashes on the start in every race.

As it turns out, the 2026 Aston Martin has been an absolute handful in testing, and a slow one at that. Sure, I half-believe the kinds of things the team says about starting off behind but having a powerful development pipeline in place. I believe Adrian Newey knows how to do those kinds of things. But I think this team might just be fundamentally dysfunctional.

And you know what? If Mercedes didn’t figure out what it was going to do in case it got caught, that’s their own fault, much as the other PU manufacturers not figuring out how to do this was their own fault. And the regulatory mess is the FIA’s own fault! This is automobile racing in its purest form.

Oh, what happened? They pretended they were going to reveal a Dodge Cup car or something, and then it turned out to be made of stacked beer cans, and Ross Chastain drove around on a little beer scooter and revved the world’s loudest billboard.

But have you seen who is driving at St. Pete?

• Sebastien Bourdais is doing the Mazda MX-5 Cup race (what????)
• Dario Franchitti is doing the truck race
• A lesser known but no less talented Andretti, Adam, is combining Truck Series duties with his usual (and dominant) Trans Am running this year, and he will be in a truck at St. Pete
• No less than Mayor James Hinchcliffe is also doing the truck race, returning to the site of his first IndyCar win to make his first NASCAR appearance (all while running back and forth to the booth for his IndyCar TV duties)
• UPDATE FEB 18: Earl Bamber is also doing the MX-5 Cup race
• UPDATE FEB 21: Colin Braun is driving the Ram free agent truck

This all makes me wonder: Who will the guest star crossovers be at Phoenix?

He did qualify for the Daytona 500 last night, and he was only two tenths behind the other rapid cars on his team. Honestly, RFK looks like the Ford team with the Daytona package to beat. That’s exciting. But Mr. K is walking with a sponsor-branded cane, and this injury has caused him the worst pain of his life. I hope we don’t see something sad happen.

The arrangement is a little bit shady now, but I think it could stand to be legitimized. IndyCar severely limits testing — just like Formula 1 does — to keep the cost of competition at a level that is manageable for small teams; otherwise, the teams with the most money could do the most testing and maintain an unsurpassable advantage as was essentially the case in bygone eras. However, Formula 1 provides a formal way for teams to run Testing of Previous Cars (TPC) programs running cars that have aged out of present-day specifications, and customer teams without old cars of their own can even borrow them from their works team, as Cadillac did before its first season.

IndyCar could conceivably allow this formally with cars like the Panoz. It also remains to be seen what will happen to all the DW12s in a couple years when the new IndyCar finally arrives. There is a balance to be struck between ensuring drivers have enough relevant seat time to be in fighting shape and keeping teams on a level playing field for testing current-spec race cars.

In other good news, Corey Heim’s #67 23XI entry was blazingly fast, and both he and my main man Justin Allgaier in the JR Motorsports #40 locked into the 500. JRM is now two for two on making the race, and after their great run last year, I would be overjoyed to see a strong result.

Also, in an amusing twist, Noah Gragson had his qualifying lap deleted because he did the hand-in-the-window aero trick that was literally just banned.

The race sold out for the 11th straight year, the purse is bigger than ever — I’d say the omens are good. As long as the weather doesn’t completely sap the event of joy like last year.

“For years, achieving a true gold look in motorsports has required compromises — limitations in depth, tone, reflectivity, and durability. ‘LEGACY Gold’ changes that equation entirely, delivering a finish that captures the richness, warmth, and dimensionality of real gold while meeting the demands of high-performance racing environments.”

You know I love a livery, and I equally love any innovation in the cool-looking-ness of race cars.

To me, this is an indication that Formula 1 remains emphatically Formula 1, and all is well in the world. I’m looking forward to seeing Kimi on track.

Hynes is rather well qualified for this position, having been a competitive open-wheel driver himself before moving behind the scenes to cultivate young, promising drivers such as one Lewis Hamilton.

I think the driver program is one of the most interesting parts of Cadillac F1 to watch. There have been so many attempts at cracking the code of making an American driver successful, and executives running the Cadillac project have not been quiet about having that ambition. Colton Herta is, of course, now explicitly waiting in the wings to be that driver, but his success is hardly guaranteed, and his window of time is small. So where will Cadillac concentrate its driver development efforts? How will it balance its novel marketing objectives with the traditional requirements? Hiring Marc Hynes is an indication that they intend to do it correctly, whether or not that means doing anything differently.

No, but seriously, there are much worse F1 teams to be benched by than Red Bull. Not only does Yuki get to drive such cool cars — a perk that will be massively upgraded this year with the Ford tie-up — he gets to be in front of crowds of F1 fans in key markets, staying relevant.

Watch on YouTube

I can’t say the show was very entertaining; it takes a lot more work to make it possible to follow — let alone enjoy — a heavily edited race on TV than these reality show producers put in. Had I been in charge, we would have at least published videos of the full race days after the episodes came out, but I also suspect those production value shortcuts extended to the on-track operations.

Cadillac F1 is fully launched now, having announced itself and its car livery to the American public during the Super Bowl last night. The ad is fantastic, keeping to the Apollo Progam theme team principal Graeme Lowdon has talked about a lot over the past year. The livery, putting my fears to rest, is very cool, too, although at least from Bahrain track photos it looks like the highly Cadillac-vibed chrome details in the ad were a lie.

The launch of the ad itself might get a little scuffed up by a lawsuit from Hollywood director Michael Bay, who claims Cadillac stole his ideas for the ad, but TWG doesn’t seem afraid of sprinkling a little money on such problems.

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The one compelling argument I had heard against my prediction is that Carson Hocevar was a shoo-in for the #48. Welp. No he ain’t.

Folks, it was not an all-timer.

Ryan Preece — a real, honest-to-god race car driver — won handily, his first win in a Cup car, and that was nice and deserved. It was fun to celebrate afterwards, but it was hard to enjoy during the race.

Watch on YouTube

Kyle Larson started on pole, but he ended like this:

Forgot to post last night. This car has seen some things.

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— John Newby (@johnnewby.bsky.social) Feb 5, 2026 at 8:54 AM

Chase Briscoe became my public enemy no. 1 by taking out everyone I wanted to win this race in one fell swoop, and even as plucky drivers continued to try to win the race, the same old boring guys kept constantly wrecking each other and neutralizing any progress. It was a 50-mile race that took three hours. They dropped it from network straight to FS2 after it was clear it wasn’t ending anytime soon. In short, NASCAR is back, baby. Hell yeah.

Here’s the highlight reel. I’m sure it’ll be funnier this way.

Watch on YouTube

It seems to me that the people responsible for the almost-entirely-bad media decisions in motorsports have been slow-walking the actual test of the widespread conventional wisdom that people whose primary value is large audiences who watch their videos on social media can be taught to drive race cars and thereby benefit the sport. If I were using this theory to justify my salary as the cHiEf iNnoVAtiOn ofFicER at some racing series headquarters, I would be hesitant to test it, too, because if the influencers suck at driving, it would all fall apart.

Given that, I applaud the courage in letting these guys race in a NASCAR event on NASCAR’s biggest weekend, which is at the beginning of the year. It rips the band-aid off, and if they’re actually good, fine, they can do another race or two this year, and if they aren’t, now we will all finally know.

NASCAR has already been an important partner with Flo, with lots of NASCAR Regional racing (including the Whelen Modified Tour) streaming there, and in related news, Flo will now simulcast some big races with NASCAR’s own FAST channel, which is really good, and which is now available right in the NASCAR mobile app in advance of this season. It’s finally almost easy to watch racing!

Everything we’ve seen from Cadillac F1 so far has this nice, understated, black/white/silver thing going, but their test livery did not suggest impeccable taste. Are they going to sully the car with neon booger green? Will Cadillac be the new Kick Sauber?

This isn’t the federation’s first move of this kind, though; last year it took ownership of the FIA World Rallycross Championship, too. Now, it has enlisted the World Rally Championship promoter group to help with that, and they’re getting close to finding a new commercial rights holder for WRC that may take rallycross over as well. Maybe the truck racing thing is a similar sort of transitional stewardship arrangement. But if not, and the Ben Sulayem administration is trying to diversify its revenue streams away from Formula 1 dependency by getting commercially involved in racing, it’s surely going to run back into the legal trouble that explains why, for example, Formula 1’s commercial rights are held independently from its sanctioning rights.

Just to be clear, this will make Buckley the fourth woman ever to compete full-time in Super2 and the only woman in Super2 or Supercars at all this year. When (not if) she moves up to the main game, she will become the second-ever woman driving full-time in Supercars (Simona de Silvestro being the first), and the first one native to Australia.