We had our third kid about a month ago (lovely, lovely, very exciting), and not long after that, I started to realize something: Writing an article — even a short one — about every racing news story that interests me is kind of a lot of work for a man in my position.

(The position of not getting paid to write them and having three kids, that is.)

Of course, caring about racing news as much as I do, and having the trained killer instincts of a Web 2.0-era shovel-blogger, I couldn’t not write those articles. That would be Incomplete! So what I did was, I queued them to write later, which I did doggedly do over the past month, but I still quickly wound up consistently about 50 posts and two weeks behind the times. This became emotionally burdensome, which is of course the exact opposite of what Turning Fortune is supposed to be.

Then it hit me: I hadn’t actually stopped watching racing. I hadn’t even stopped posting about racing. I was just doing it on Bluesky, an act as immediate and natural as breathing to me, and frankly one where many full Blog Post™ versions of my racing takes originate. Furthermore, I consider that account to be for racing news, and while it could stand to have a little more discipline, that seems manageable. Posting less isn’t that hard. So I had the idea: Why don’t I slurp social-media-shaped posts into the Turning Fortune News section?

I’ll call them tweets. Like the sound a bird makes. Get it?

You won’t be required to care what service these tweets are from (which I’ve made it possible to change without disrupting anything). You won’t have to use any dumb apps yourself if you don’t already. You’ll just be able to get Turning Fortune news tweets — tweeted from whatever app we’re using for tweeting at any given point in history — right here on Turning Fortune.

Tweets won’t appear in the RSS feed or the @turningfortune.com Bluesky feed like blog posts do. They’ll appear in the feeds of the accounts who tweeted them, which you will be able to easily get to from the website if that’s where you find them (as long as those accounts are still online). But a visitor to turningfortune.com will see tweets integrated into the flow of News posts, and they’ll show up alongside blog posts in search. Thus, even if I haven’t Blogged™ about something, you, dear visitor, will be able to achieve the clear objective of coming here, which is to catch up on the latest motor racing news.

Tweets start now!

With the amount of factory Porsche 963 seats in the world halved for the foreseeable future — and no 963 seats whatsoever at Le Mans — the squeeze is on for Porsche’s top drivers. So as news began to roll out about some of their next moves, it looked at first like a silly season for the ages, but it turns out to just be well-orchestrated rollouts of some orderly transitions.

There was never any question that Laurin Heinrich was destined for a full-time job in the top class, and when he won Laguna Seca in a privateer entry in last year’s car, Porsche Penske Motorsport took advantage of the obvious PR advantage of announcing him right afterwards. This meant some piece on the board had to move, and based on what was public at the time, it had to be Laurens Vanthoor — who had recently, without anybody really asking, declared in a press conference that he would be racing for Porsche next year. When it turned out that he meant only in the endurance rounds, people thought he might be headed for a farm upstate.

There was, however, a twist coming: Vanthoor was about to be announced as the first big name driver for McLaren in their upcoming WEC Hypercar entry. It turns out that Larry is going to have a next act, and it might be an incredibly fruitful one.

Yesterday, my area of the internet discovered an astonishing bit of merchandise for sale on the IndyCar website. It was a t-shirt for the ✌️“Freedom 250”✌️, the publicly-funded political campaign event masquerading as an IndyCar race, with which Roger Penske is very happy to help. Given the circumstances, it was inevitable that at least one horrific thing would happen, and this t-shirt has become the first. It is no longer available, so please allow me to provide a screenshot:

Yes, that says, “One Nation, One Race” (and yes, it was on sale for FIFTY DOLLARS). It’s the kind of t-shirt that gets designed by someone who knows what they’re doing and then sneaks it past their idiot manager who thinks it’s fine. In fact, I guarantee you no one of any importance at IndyCar ever looked at this shirt before it went on sale, and I’ll tell you how I know. IndyCar’s “One Race” is not the ✌️“Freedom 250”✌️. It’s the Indianapolis 500. There is no way in hell anyone who works directly for Roger Penske would ever even let him find out such a t-shirt was made, even if it wasn’t also a breathtaking display of white nationalism.

Now, Penske is a noted Trumpist, and this incident has made many people point to that as evidence that IndyCar is a white nationalist organization. I’ve done enough speculation in this post already, so I won’t speculate any further. I’ll just point out that the internet found out about this shirt, and it disappeared within the hour.

I follow lots of motorsports news websites, as you know, and I was waiting for a better reported story about this to come out before writing my own post. No one covered it. So I figure I’ll put up this little memento, and we’ll see if we ever hear about this again or if the store manager person is keeping the Captain in the dark about it.

I am relieved not to have to write more about energy management or regulations this round than, “They tweaked the rules, it got better, they aren’t done yet, the end.” Thus is the nature of Formula 1. Big whoop.

The surprise of the Miami Grand Prix weekend was Miami itself. I think the idea that it’s a dull race track was mostly a hangover from the earliest iterations, but this year was a definitive turning point. Its twisty stop-and-go nature flattered the new cars. In the mega-downforce era, they just sort of slurped along without much issue, but now they wobble and slide (and spin) more. Plus, the layout is easy on the battery, so there really weren’t any meaningful energy problems. It was just an F1 race, and a rather good one at that.

But, significantly, this was also Formula 2’s debut at the Miami International Autodrome thanks to World Events™, and it put on two absolute firecrackers. I hope the right people noticed and plan to capitalize on that by bringing them back.

The grand prix was moved earlier to adjust for possible rain, which everyone got excited would happen anyway but did not.

In terms of world championship proceedings, Kimi Antonelli won his third race in a row from pole, and you might think that would be an indication of the return of boring Mercedes dominance, but you’d be wrong because George Russell got beaten by both McLarens, who also went 1-2 in the sprint race. Yes, the defending world champions are back, and they still know how to develop a car better than anybody else. Things are getting interesting.

Ferrari’s upgrades don’t seem to have gotten them anywhere, although Charles Leclerc’s P8 (after penalties) was largely of his own making. He had a bit of a brain fart on the last lap.

His wasn’t the only brain fart of the race, to be sure: Max Verstappen looped his car on the start and immediately gave away what could have been the lead, and his teammate Isack Hadjar took himself out of contention fairly immediately by knocking the front left corner off. Many accused Liam Lawson of a brain fart that led to Pierre Gasly retiring with his car upside down, but it was (fairly obviously) a gearbox failure going into a corner that rendered Lawson unable to slow down.

Verstappen — who started second and finished fifth — won driver of the day, which is ridiculous. The driver of the day was the winner, Kimi Antonelli, who was under pressure from the defending world champion and did not falter. Kimi still has his wild moments over a weekend, but it might not be very long before it’s obvious to all of us that he will imminently be world champion.

The IMSA race at Laguna Seca — maybe any race at Laguna Seca — can be a bit volatile. When it’s bad, it’s bad — and not bad in the boring way, bad in the dangerous way. However, when it’s good, it reminds you why this track is historic and why we’re so lucky it’s still here.

IMSA makes an effort to reinforce that historic element by making this the championship’s “throwback race,” when teams bring one-off liveries that harken back to the greatest liveries of a particular make, team, or sponsor, connecting the race on track today with the long legacy of motor racing. For whatever reason, both in sports cars and in NASCAR, people have been turning sour on this practice this year. I can’t even articulate what those people’s objection is, beyond just not wanting to have to learn to recognize a different scheme on track. I couldn’t disagree more strenuously. Racing lineages are core to what racing is, and every chance to honor a lineage is an access point for people to go deeper into the sport.

The 2026 IMSA Laguna Seca liveries were unimpeachable no matter what you think about the practice in general, though. Top of the pile was clearly the Porsche Penske Motorsport Apple Computer six-colors livery, which was made famous on a Porsche 935 that raced at the 1980 24 Hours of Le Mans. As far as I’m concerned, the 963 is now a canonical participant in that livery, Apple is back in the motorsports game, and the rainbow colors are once again Apple’s official brand colors, so they are required to make all their devices in each of those colors now. You’re welcome, John Ternus.

In very close second place was my hometown GTD Pro team, Paul Miller Racing, which ran a tribute to the 1975 BMW 3.0 CSL that won Sebring. The M4 GT3 EVO looked outrageously cool with those stripes.

Honorable mention goes to AO Racing’s “Sketchy” livery, which is a tribute to the original hand-drawn concepts for Rexy. It’s a bit self-important to do a throwback to your current car, I feel, but hey, Rexy has probably earned icon status at this point. It’s the only sports car my kids know the name of, anyway.

There was some bad news prior to the race: The DXDT Racing transporter caught fire en route, and this was not one of those happy-ending stories when the team is able to move heaven and earth to make the race. The #36 was taken out of contention, depriving Robert Wickens of one of his starts this year, which sucks.

As for things that happened on track, the Michelin Pilot Challenge series had its last race at Laguna for the foreseeable future, and it went out in storybook fashion. The #95 Turner Motorsport BMW of Luca Mars and Dillon Machavern got the team its first win in Monterey since 2009. They started eighth and raced up to third, then went to the front with good pitstop timing and defended the position the rest of the way. In TCR, Bryan Herta Autosport finished 1-2, which happens.

In the WeatherTech series, Cadillac qualified 1-2-3 with the Wayne Taylor #40 on pole. I knew better than to get excited about the race, though. In GTD Pro, the #14 Vasser Sullivan Lexus RC F GT3 — which is an entire throwback car, even with its usual livery — poled it, and they’ve traditionally struggled at Laguna Seca. This team is really giving this car a hell of a sendoff before it’s replaced by the upcoming GR GT.

The race was awesome, unless you are exclusively a fan of Cadillac Racing. The Cadillac that was there at the end was the #31 — obviously, not the WTR cars — with Earl Bamber at the helm, but it was clear as the end drew near that Laurin Heinrich was catching him. Now, you may not be overly surprised to hear that, but what if I told you that he was not driving the Penske 963 but in fact the JDC-Miller MotorSports 963? Yes, Heinrich was driving last year’s car for a privateer team, and on the last lap, he caught and passed Bamber and won! It was the first privateer victory of the LMDh era, and I hope it augurs a stout second chapter for the category as factory interest begins to falter. Heinrich won’t be driving the privateer cars, though; he was promoted to full-time at Penske immediately after this performance.

The GTD Pro class was won by the #65 Mustang of Frederic Vervisch and Christopher Mies. It was a big comeback from a puncture, and it vaulted the #65 back into championship contention.

I regret to inform my wallet and yours that LEGO is doing the right thing and making a Speed Champions Ferrari 499P. It’s the 51 car, intriguingly.

I don’t think NASCAR should keep sending EVP/chief racing development officer John Probst out to talk to people. Not because of the job he does, but because of how allergic all NASCAR people outside the building are to talking about the future, which is his job.

He gave a fairly interesting and wide-ranging interview to Sports Business Journal’s Adam Stern recently which had the NASCARverse convinced that he was about to replace stock cars with electric crossover utility vehicles in the O’Reilly Series. That is not what he said, and that is not what NASCAR is going to do.

Every time Probst’s work becomes public, everybody thinks he’s working on some kind of Illuminati plot to destroy the tradition of American racing. What he is actually doing is preparing the sport for future contingencies, which is what businesspeople who are not idiots do.

As NASCAR has now had to clarify, this electric CUV body — just like the whole “Gold Codes” plan for NASCAR to operate the cars itself if the team owners revolted — is preparation to respond to threats. It’s not like NASCAR wants to utterly transform its cars; that’s expensive. It’s that NASCAR wants to continue to exist if the auto industry stops making sedans or something — which could definitely happen! It is Probst’s job to be ready to make NASCAR still sound like fun if it’s forced into that world instead of being caught in perma-2003 and going out of business. Fans should be glad he’s doing this.

Laurin Heinrich will join the Porsche factory drivers finding Le Mans gigs in LMP2 by hopping in the CrowdStrike by APR #4 with George Kurtz and Alex Quinn. This is the team that won the Daytona 24 this year, where of course Heinrich was occupied driving a Porsche 963. Famously, there are no Porsche 963s at Le Mans this year, but if there were, I imagine he’d be driving one of those instead.

After 24 years in the race car business, Lucas di Grassi will retire from racing at the end of this Formula E season. He was the first driver to commit to the Formula E championship in its debut season in 2014, and he won the first race. He won 13 races total and was the champion of the 2016–2017 season.

Formula E wasn’t the only chapter of di Grassi’s career. He did three full seasons in the FIA World Endurance Championship, finishing second in the 2016 championship with Audi, and he was on the podium at Le Mans three times. Prior to that, di Grassi contested the 2010 Formula 1 season for Virgin Racing.

His results in Formula E haven’t been fantastic the past few years, so it’s understandable that he’s ready to hang it up, but he’s made a big impact on racing and deserves a salute.

In IndyCar culture, “May” is shorthand for all the ritual surrounding the Indy 500, but one of the culture’s inside jokes is that May actually starts in April. The two-day open test at Indy is when rookie orientation and veteran re-orientation happens, and teams and drivers brush the cobwebs out and make sure they’re ready to go flat out when real 500 testing starts in actual-May. But it’s still two entire days of Indy cars driving around the speedway. It counts. And the best part is, they stream the whole thing on YouTube for free.

The open test is one of my favorite motorsports broadcasts of the year because it is truly built to purpose for one of things I love most about watching racing: meditating on the driving itself without thinking about anything else. For the second year in a row, I’m pretty sure I heard every minute of the broadcast because I had it on in the background while I went about my days.

There was not really any news to report, which is good because the only kind of news that can really come from such a test is bad news, and there was none. Katherine Legge’s HMD-run Foyt car had a bit of trouble getting out on track — some kind of clutch issue — and she had to make up her refresher on day 2, but she did so in time to run the whole of the long session that day with everybody out on track.

There’s not a whole lot one can say about performances because some teams don’t even bring speedway cars to this test, but the one I do want to shout out is that of Caio Collet. I was so obsessed with Dennis Hauger last year that I did not expect Caio to be the one who sent it the most at this test. I will begin expecting that.

Sarah Bovy has shared her racing itinerary for 2026. She will run the full season in the GT2 European Series with Laura van den Hengel, and it will be the debut of the Iron Dames colors in that series, which might make it worth tuning in to. GT2 is weird, but hey, it’s fast.

Bovy will also drive the Comtoyou Racing Aston Martin Vantage with an all-Belgian crew — also including Nicolas Baert, Xavier Knauf, and Gregory Servais — in the 24 Hours of Spa. That will be worth tuning in to.

Those of us who have exulted in Shane van Gisbergen running the table at NASCAR road courses at all levels have experienced a bit of a down year so far in 2026 as Trackhouse struggles and the SVG oval awakening continues not to materialize. Watkins Glen ought to fix that. Shane will pull his first ever triple-duty at the Glen this year, and while his Cup Series equipment might not be in peak form (not that that will matter), the Trucks and O’Reilly fields should just start and park right now. Shane will drive the #4 Niece Motorsports Chevy in the truck race and the #9 JR Motorsports Chevy in O’Reilly.

Not to be left out, though, Shane’s favorite teammate, young Connor Zilisch, will be joining Shane in the triple-header. They’ll be teammates in O’Reilly, with Connor in the 1 car, and Connor will be driving for Spire in Trucks in the #71.

Good luck, anybody else.

It is vanishingly rare that streaming bundling deal announcements announce anything other than incoming irritation, but I think there’s actually a potentially interesting pattern emerging here.

The CW is the lucky little network with the broadcast rights for the NASCAR O’Reilly Series. They got NASCAR’s best racing product, so they created the best NASCAR broadcast, and quickly this became the only unmitigated success story in NASCAR media. There is in fact a CW app, which is free and ad-supported, and non-race sessions, onboards, and their Battle Cam commentary-free broadcast are streamed on it, but to watch the actual race broadcast, you have to watch on live TV or its digital bundle equivalents. Not everybody pays for that, though, preferring to selectively and directly stream only the things they’re interested in, and until now there was no way to do that for O’Reilly races on the CW.

What the CW has — I think wisely — done is, rather than create their own paid streaming service that would have no chance in hell, they have made a deal with ESPN to stream on their service. The ESPN app doesn’t really have any big sports yet, but it is gradually assembling an eclectic mix that could make it worthwhile for some sports fans to at least throw it into a Disney/Hulu bundle. If ESPN wants to get motorsports into the mix, O’Reilly is a big get.

Now, the people in charge at bigger networks than the CW won’t want to hear this, but they’re never going to get enough subscribers for their bespoke streaming services, either. More of them should consider making deals with streaming services people do subscribe to — or at least ones that have clear value propositions for sports fans — for exclusive streaming of the sports they have TV broadcast rights for.

IMSA is probably the best case study here. Everybody in the U.S. who watches IMSA knows that Peacock isn’t moving the needle. Apple TV — which is moving the needle with Formula 1 — already has some kind of bundling arrangement with Peacock that lets Apple TV subscribers get Peacock at a discount, so they already have a distribution-sharing relationship. Apple is making big moves for U.S. race fans. NBC is not. Why doesn’t Apple pay NBC to let Apple TV stream IMSA directly? Who wouldn’t like that?

Katherine Legge will enter the 110th running of the Indianapolis 500. I don’t want to downplay how awesome that is, because it is, but those with their ear to the ground basically knew it was happening, and when Larry Foyt was on her podcast this month, I was ready to take a super wild guess who would be providing her a car.

It turns out to be a slightly more interesting — in a good way — effort. Not that Foyt is any slouch at preparing Speedway cars, AJ Foyt Racing is going to be more of a technical partner for this entry. The 11 car is actually being operated by HMD Motorsports, an IndyNXT championship-winning team, which is taking this opportunity to step up to IndyCar racing.

The effort is backed by Legge’s incredible sponsor, e.l.f. Cosmetics, and the livery looks as beautiful as you would expect a beauty company’s race car to look. Everybody wins here. Foyt gets another piece on the board with a driver making her fifth Indy start. HMD is incentivized to execute a perfect race, as this is its first time in the big show. Katherine gets the best race car she’s had at Indy in ages. I cannot wait.

And that brings us to a full field of 33. May is almost here.

Juncos Hollinger and Dreyer & Reinbold are apparently co-entering Rinus VeeKay’s #76 car at the Indy 500 with primary sponsorship from Wedbush. DRR has two of its own entries this year, with Conor Daly and Jack Harvey, and Juncos is of course VeeKay’s employer for the full season. Teams do weird things to get cars on the grid at Indy, but I’m not sure I’ve ever seen one team join another team’s full-season car before. Please let me know if there’s an example.

I don’t really get this one. It is apparently some sort of technical alliance, but do these teams actually need each other’s help in any meaningful way? Apparently it’s not a proactive one like most such alliances, like how Foyt is essentially a Penske farm team and MSR is the same for Ganassi. It’s more like, if Juncos finds something that DRR doesn’t, or vice versa, they’ll share their little tips and tricks for making speed.

The only more significant thing this brings to mind for me is the rumor that Dreyer & Reinbold want to go full-time in 2028, when the new car comes out. Perhaps Juncos wants to get out of their charters. And who could blame them? They have to keep giving Sting Ray Robb one of the cars to drive.