The day-to-day motorsports news we find most pertinent from around the world. Mostly links and commentary, occasional scoops and announcements. Absolutely any form of motorized vehicle racing is eligible, but we do have our favorites.
See the Pit Wall for more info, resources, and oddities.
Click the instant online racing community button
The day-to-day motorsports news we find most pertinent from around the world. Mostly links and commentary, occasional scoops and announcements. Absolutely any form of motorized vehicle racing is eligible, but we do have our favorites.
See the Pit Wall for more info, resources, and oddities.
I hate this so much. SUPER GT, Japan’s premier sports car championship and the only series left that races Class One cars, had to cancel its Sepang round because the oil shock caused by the U.S./Israel attack on Iran has pushed Malaysia’s economy into a state of emergency. There will now be only seven SUPER GT rounds in 2026
I will say it again: Motorsports is pro-peace and anti-war!
I applaud NASCAR for finally drawing any sort of line with this guy. After doing basically nothing but spin in any NASCAR races, Cleetus and his employers at Richard Childress Racing felt it was time for him to begin his assigned program getting on TV at superspeedway races, but NASCAR officials have denied him the opportunity until he accomplishes, you know, something. Maybe they calculated that they would get the same amount of YouTube attention for denying him as they would for running him.
Toyota has made a little bit clearer what was previously only slightly clearer than mud about the decision to pull WRC star and aspiring F1 driver Kalle Rovanperä out of Super Formula right before the season started. The issue may indeed be driven by medical conditions, but the bottom line is that he simply wasn’t ready. His winter competition and testing was so fraught with problems (and crashes) that Toyota couldn’t roll him out as their new open-wheel protégé and let him faceplant in front of the world.
Oh well. Maybe next year.
Lance Stroll is taking advantage of this year’s surprise war-enforced spring break in Formula 1 to race the Aston Martin Vantage GT3 Evo in GT World Challenge Europe at Paul Ricard. Comtoyou Racing will now field four Vantages in the season opener. Stroll’s co-drivers are ex-F1 driver Roberto Merhi and Aston Martin junior driver Mari Boya.
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.
I guess I want this to be good news, but honestly I feel only nervousness about Alex Bowman getting back in the car. He’s suddenly okay to race again after problems in his head area that kept him out of four races? His vertigo is all gone now, so he can jump straight in and go race on a halfpipe at Bristol? This seems crazy to me. Hope it goes well, though!!
I regret to report that Super Formula 2026 is looking pretty boring so far now that there are no big-name rookies left. Somebody give Kaku Ohta a full-time job in one of the greatest racing series on Earth so that some other Japanese domestic drivers can have a chance to prove something.
It has always been fairly clear that the Formula 1 career of Franco Colapinto is driven by surrounding financial interests. If someone keeps getting personally escorted into F1 cars in place of drivers who are at worst equally talented, that’s simply the reasonable conclusion to draw. But the absurdity of going racing that way is becoming ever clearer in this case.
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.
Dystany Spurlock, the former motorcycle drag racer, made her first ARCA start last weekend at Hickory. She stayed in the race all day and finished on the lead lap in 7th place. Her next race is this weekend at Rockingham. “NASCAR has always been my heart,” Spurlock says, and her campaign to make it to that level is off to a great start.
At last, on the eve of the first race, announced only in Jamie Klein’s Substack without which English speakers simply would not know anything about Japanese racing, we have confirmation that a subscription to Super Formula’s SFgo app will be the only way for international viewers to watch Japan’s top-tier open-wheel championship this year now that Motorsport.tv has been mercifully unplugged.
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.
James Warburton has already quit running Supercars once; his first tenure as CEO was from 2013 to 2017. Last year, he stepped into a bit of a power vacuum that had opened up at an inflection point for the series’ international profile, and the Australian motorsports world seemed optimistic that he was the right leader at the right time.
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.
Jack Doohan’s winter was not much nicer than his preceding spring, when he was replaced at Alpine F1 by Franco Colapinto for no performance-based reason. He looked set to stay in single-seaters in Super Formula, but that fell through, and the best he could do was land a [reserve job at Haas}(/news/jack-doohan-gets-haas-f1-reserve-driver-job/). Well, Doohan wants to keep racing, and he has made the very reasonable choice to enter the European Le Mans Series with Nielsen Racing in the LMP2 Pro/Am category. I bet he’ll be quick.
2025 F1 Academy champion Doriane Pin will now pull double development driver duty this year for both Mercedes F1 and the Peugeot WEC hypercar team. Pin was already a rising star in top-level sports car competition before making what some considered an ill-advised leap into single seaters. Good thing she did not take those people’s advice.
If the team name containing the word Magma and the first mockups being eye-searingly orange got you excited, I have slightly tragic news: The typical life-sucking process of getting corporate approval for a top-tier factory race car livery has rendered the Genesis Magma Racing GMR-001 gray. Both cars are gray. They aren’t the same gray; they are different grays.
Anyway, the car will make its racing debut at the FIA WEC season opener, the 6 Hours of Imola, from April 17–19.
This is a juicy one. The Red Bull-sponsored Team Australia trophy truck duo of Toby Price and Brent Bauman have been disqualified from the SCORE International San Felipe 250 off-road race in Mexico, having finished 17th. They are accused of placing rocks in the path of their competitors according to some inconclusive but certainly sketchy Instagram videos. Both driver and navigator deny the allegations, but they have resigned from competition, you know, just in case.
I might as well go on record here: I do not find the zMAX CARS Tour worthy of the hype, which can be easily generated by its racing celebrity owners despite the racing product being consistently unwatchable.
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.
Lola is doing much more to distinguish itself in its motor racing comeback attempt than I expected. Apparently as a way of showing off its prowess in composite manufacturing, it has just announced a new T70.
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.
There’s just nobody who does it like the Aussies. It’s no longer surprising to see any given Australian road racing series put on door-to-door nail-biters; what impresses me now is seeing what kinds of crazy mixtures of series promoters can pull together.
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
— Jon 🛞 (@jon.turningfortune.com) Mar27, 2026 at 9:42 PM
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Seeing that ending does not spoil it, of course, because it was a coin flip. Watch the whole thing.
I don’t know why people insist on being hipsters about SRO-sanctioned sports car racing, but they’re missing out. These grids are all stacked. SRO championships are not just giving ams more way to spend money; they’re filling in the gaps allowing each global region’s working sports car drivers to have careers.
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.
There were a few interesting standouts from NASCAR’s Martinsville weekend.
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:
I see no reason to continue writing diatribes about the 2026 Formula 1 regulations every time a race happens, but here’s what I want to say:
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.
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