The 410 sprint car scene is a little awkward right now, with World of Outlaws pretending to be all the world needs and High Limit Racing making its incursion with elite racing ownership and an unfathomably better streaming package, and this deal takes things up a notch. To me, Interstate Batteries is one of the most iconic racing sponsors ever, and I always love seeing their livery on a sprint car, usually one driven by Christopher Bell. Apparently they like what they see, because now it’s Interstate Batteries High Limit Racing — they’re sponsoring the whole series.

I am so proud of NASCAR. They are fucking around to a degree I’ve never seen, and they’re staying on point for both NASCAR culture and 21st-century-relevant media culture.

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.

Everybody is always dying for St. Pete by the time it comes around because we spend so much of the year with no IndyCar, but this year is different. For one thing, it’s the first of two race weekends where IndyCar and NASCAR will split the bill; the Craftsman Truck Series will run at St. Pete, and IndyCar will run at NASCAR’s March Phoenix weekend. It’s almost as though things are starting to gel in 21st-century American motor racing finally.

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?

I am not one of these Gen Z softboy racing fans, okay? I believe that race car drivers should be tough motherfuckers, and that if they physically can drive, they should. But I have been watching Brad Keselowski lurch his way back from slipping on ice and breaking his femur, and I am not convinced he can physically drive.

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.

Though it seems like it has actually been going on under the radar for a while Marshall Pruett recently discovered that a Brownsburg, Indiana company called MKR Racing has acquired a bunch of Will Power’s favorite race car — the Panoz DP-01 that ran for the final 2007 season of the Champ Car World Series — allowing current and prospective IndyCar drivers to gain relevant testing and experience in these absolute beasts without falling foul of IndyCar’s testing restrictions.

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.

I often hear a take that NASCAR superspeedway racing is so much of a crapshoot that qualifying doesn’t matter, and I get it, but I don’t agree. I mean, I agree that it’s a crapshoot, but to me the point of watching stock car racing at Daytona or Talladega is to see who has the best car and — if they don’t win — compare it to the one who overcomes the circumstances. I did not have it on my bingo card that Richard Childress Racing would prepare the #8 as the fastest car, or that — in his 21st attempt — Kyle Busch would drive it to pole. My rooting for him feels super rewarded.

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.

I’m still in the process of warming to Carson Hocevar, and I don’t think I’m alone in that. I really love listening to him be himself off track. On track, I’d say I love watching him 50% of the time, which is not quite enough. But there is nothing a racing driver can do to get in my good graces like driving all the time in as many different cars as possible, and doing Trucks, O’Reilly, and the Daytona 500 is admirable. I do hope he has something left for Sunday from the 50% I like, though.

“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.

Five-year deals at Hendrick Motorsports are sort of NASCAR’s grand prize, at least as far as job security for race car drivers. I’m not going to put Larson in the Jeff Gordon/Jimmie Johnson category yet, but he could get there. Certainly he’s in the Dale Jr. category.

I try to keep my cool around Corvettes, but I do a very bad job, as anyone aware of my thing for AWA/13 Autosport is aware. I think that one has just been outdone, though. The two-car TF Sport Corvette attack on the FIA World Endurance Championship this year will feature a red one and a yellow one. They’re not wrapped, they’re candy-painted. Hnnnnnnnnngggggggg

Five days ago, Mercedes posted an Instagram photo of F1 sophomore Kimi Antonelli taking receipt of a 1-of-200 Mercedes-AMG GT 63 Pro Motorsports Collectors Edition handsomely decorated in Mercedes-AMG Petronas Formula 1 Team colors. Two nights later, the car was in the fence near Kimi’s home in San Marino. Kimi was fine, and he called the police himself. We don’t know whether he was driving.

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.

It seems only right that Scott Dixon’s sole classmate in the IMS Museum Hall of Fame is the guy who made the car.

With Bahrain testing already underway, Cadillac has hired Marc Hynes as Chief Racing Officer, which is a rather hefty title to have on a motor racing team. The job will entail aligning the sporting and technical sides of the team operationally as well as managing the driver program.

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.

Yuki Tsunoda will co-star with Scott Speed in a demo of vintage Red Bull F1 cars on the streets of San Francisco later this month. That certainly beats sitting in the back of a garage with headphones on, as he will usually be doing at grands prix.

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.

Kyle Busch is the winningest driver in the history of the NASCAR Craftsman Truck Series, and last year a truck race was the only national-series NASCAR race he won. I don’t know what other NASCAR fans think about a lot of things — which usually seems to be to my benefit — but I know I was happy to see that win. Kyle Busch is an awesome race car driver, and just because he doesn’t get along with the NextGen car doesn’t mean he has to have an ignominious end to his NASCAR career.

NASCAR has followed up its “Hell Yeah” season trailer with a stunt I expect will be underrated as a demonstration that this may be a new NASCAR, but it’s still NASCAR. Things have gotten all professional and shit, and so the people who are crowing about having pulled this off sound like nerdy PR people when they do it. Don’t let that distract from the fact that NASCAR put up a billboard in Times Square with a screaming Cup car motor on it.

As rumors of restructuring at Renault — including the closing of the Alpine racing headquarters at Viry-Chatillon and possibly the Alpine brand altogether — continue to trickle out, Viry-Chatillon’s mayor has posted a video excoriating the company for a sort of shadiness that would not surprise anyone who has paid attention to Alpine F1 recently. Mayor Jean-Marie Vilain suggests that there may be definitive news as soon as this Thursday.

Following the unfortunate retirement of the SC63 prototype, former F1 driver turned Lamborghini works driver Daniil Kvyat has found an interesting new gig with JLOC in Japan’s Super GT championship. He’ll be driving the Huracan EVO2 rather than the new Temerario in the GT300 class, but I don’t expect that to diminish anything about the excellent racing in Super GT.

Look, I understand this isn’t everybody’s thing, but this video makes me really optimistic for 2026 as NASCAR’s cultural comeback season. It’s not easy to make a video that addresses everybody in America instead of 50.000% of it these days, but I feel that they’ve done it. The Menace II Society reference? Perfect.

A special new job that is totally not a demotion and sounds permanent until a couple months later is the F1 paddock’s version of the golden parachute for the top tier of jobs that still to some extent involve actual racing. It’s not really news that Cowell was effectively fired as team principal at the end of 2025, but it did make a modicum of sense for him to concentrate his expertise on making sure the new Honda power unit made it to the grid. Job done now.