News

People online are being obnoxious about this, which obviously makes me want to post about it more. The American SRO-sanctioned sports car racing championships are getting nice, tight broadcast packages of all their 2026 events on Fox Sports 1, creating potential for many more Americans to see high-level sports car racing than might otherwise do so. I’ve been watching exactly these sorts of broadcasts of the 1999 British GT season, and it’s some of my greatest motorsports comfort viewing.

More race car good, less race car bad. That is and will always be my position.

All pre-season test liveries are weird and half-assed. We know this. As those go, there is something almost clever about how the sideways clip art Cadillac logo sort of resembles the robot barf camouflage patterns teams tend to use. But. But. I sure hope someone else is in charge of the real racing livery for America’s (High-Budget) Formula 1 Team.

At this point, we don’t really know if Prema Racing exists or not. Last year at this time, they were about to launch an IndyCar team. Now Deborah Mayer has pulled her funding from racing, the Rosins have left their posts, the Iron Dames are done racing, and yet as far as we know, Prema is still racing in single-seaters. I can’t imagine the stress the drivers are under.

This is a well deserved appointment, and what an honor to be announced first, all by himself! To me, that’s a signal McLaren sees Jensen as a star of the future, so they want the world to get to know him before they announce some of the blockbuster names that are surely coming from other departments at McLaren Racing. Those names may generate the bulk of the headlines, but it’s likely they’ll be on more limited and specialized programs. Jensen is the main man. It’s cool that they’re giving him this leadership position of going first.

I suppose that if you are an OEM with solid brand affinity trying to return to NASCAR and also the public consciousness, you would be dumb not to spend as much money on it as you possibly can. One must make headlines to succeed at these things. In the new year, Ram has made two.

One is that they are awarding one of their Truck Series seats to the winner of a reality show. Now, people will scoff at this. I have seen nothing but people scoffing at this. But I will reserve judgment until it comes out, because I would like to remind everyone that making motor racing into a reality show has been fairly successful recently. To be good, this show would have to both successfully pick a competent NASCAR Craftsman Truck Series driver and actively increase a large audience’s engagement with and literacy in motorsports. Could it do all that? Sure! Let’s see if it does.

The other headline is that Tony Stewart is coming back to NASCAR racing to drive one of these trucks AT DAYTONA. Maybe this is shocking because Smoke has been doing anything other than NASCAR for 10 years and seemed to be totally, permanently fed up with it. In other words, this was probably a very large line item in Ram’s NASCAR budget.

This race was a great demo of why Formula E is uniquely fun and interesting among racing categories (when it isn’t a shit show in a way that is really fairly normal among racing categories). Cassidy qualified P13. He saved energy and stayed out of trouble, took advantage of some sudden opportunities, and then went for it. Superb drive.

All right, it would be negligent not to point out that Citroën is much closer to a rebrand than a new team that should be getting all warm and fuzzy about out-of-the-gate success, and in fact it might be argued the team had some unfair advantages getting going, but come on, this is a glorious win no matter how you slice it.

Dan Ticktum, though — as is his wont — had a miserable time.

NASCAR has at last abandoned its absurd win-and-you’re-in playoffs format that absolutely no one found exciting and was by definition unable to produce meaningful champions. It has gone back to a 10-race Chase but with some significant scoring and seeding differences from last time.

Winning a race is worth a major gap in points compared to that between any other positions, which I find to be an excellent replacement for win-and-you’re-in. Everyone who blames WaYi (yes, I did that) for the kamikaze style of racing of the previous era is absolutely right, but I believe it is also still good to incentivize winning and racing hard instead of cruising for points. It’s also good to award stage points, since it keeps people pushing throughout the race. These are mechanics that actually make NASCAR racing exciting, and now they will finally matter throughout the whole season.

Some people have also complained about the fact that the cutoff position for the Chase is P16 — they think there should be fewer cars — but that makes no sense to me. The more cars there are in the Chase, the closer to a normal motorsports championship it is, and it’s not like the P16 car is going to be able to leapfrog everyone and win the championship like they could before. They’re going to have to be absolutely magnificent for 10 weeks, and if they do that, hell, crown ’em.

There are also reasonable business reasons to start with many contestants, and I feel like modern fans are not understanding enough of such things. In order for motorsports to be good, you have to, you know, have motorsports at all.

This gets my vote for most rightful decision of the entire worldwide 2026 motor racing silly season. First woman ever to win in the FIA World Endurance Championship, first woman to podium in Super GT, winner in multiple IMSA classes, 2025 IMSA Michelin Endurance Cup champion in GTD. Twenty-five years old. She has tested the 499P, arguably the greatest race car on Earth at the moment, and I hope to see her win Le Mans in it soon.

The motorsports world mourns the passing of legendary racing driver Hans Herrmann at the age of 97. He was an overall winner of the 24 Hours of Le Mans — the first win for Porsche — as well as the 24 Hours of Daytona and the 12 Hours of Sebring, and he drove for the Mercedes Formula 1 team with a best finish of 3rd.

I encourage you to read the many obituaries below.

Although the weather was unrepresentatively cold, Firestone is happy with the race tire for IndyCar’s first time at Phoenix Raceway in eight years. It’s important that everybody get this right because it’s a double-header with NASCAR, so it presents a critical opportunity to get IndyCar back in front of most American motorsports fans.

This test was also the on-track debut of Will Power at Andretti Global. In most top-level racing series, changing teams and cars after almost 17 years might seem terrifying. In IndyCar, though, it’s pretty much the same deal, given that everybody’s been driving the same car since 2012. No, seriously, it’s actually pretty momentous. This time last year, we thought Will might be heading into his last season in IndyCar, and now he’s driving a Honda and going to kick Penske’s ass.

I like what I see in the balance of performance (BoP) just announced for the Roar, which looks like it will carry over to the race unless anything weird happens at the test. Even despite massive upgrades on multiple cars, the GTP field is only separated by 11kg in weight and 2.9% in second-stage power. GT3 doesn’t look too bad either, even with the McLaren coming back after a year away.

Pairs amusingly with the new censorship rules, though, doesn’t it?

IMSA’s VP Racing SportsCar Challenge (must they, with the CamelCase?) has a lot of exciting updates in 2026 that, for me, bring it up to par as a racing product with the other two multi-class IMSA championships. It’s getting the new LMP3 generation, the new single-make BMW M2 Racing class is joining its four two-hour endurance rounds at Sebring, COTA, VIR, and Road America — which are also new —  and now those endurance rounds have been entitled the IMSA Airbnb Endurance Challenge and will be their own championship-within-a-championship like the Michelin Endurance Cup in the big leagues.

When I first saw this news, I was worried the whole championship had been renamed, and I hated that. Nothing worse than an automotive sponsor being replaced by something irrelevant. But now that I understand that it’s actually creating a new sub-competition endurance-focused teams can target — a dynamic I find works really well in the WeatherTech championship — I have come around completely. It adorably connotes the idea of traveling to these four rounds and renting a place to stay, which is something I heartily encourage people to do.

“It’s in the name,” the website begins by saying.

HybridV10 is the name of a venture Anthony Hamilton has apparently been working on quite hard undercover, and the plan has now gone live. He wants to bring back “real racing,” like all motorsports old guys do, but this plan actually sounds reasonably serious. It’s a spec open-wheel series with two classes, V8 and V10, and it will all be very centrally managed and well supervised. He wants the competition to be all about the drivers and the experience to be all about the fans. They’re even throwing around the word “festivals” to describe the events.

I love this. It doesn’t even sound like it’s trying to compete with Formula 1, which has long since chosen to deliberately leave this kind of thing behind. And clearly, the father of one of the greatest to ever do it will have seen it all by now and know what needs to be done differently. I just have no idea whatsoever how realistic this is. He says they have backers, and I hope they come through, because if so, this will be the true racing-first series the incumbents need to see in order to put their existing products into perspective.

Josef Newgarden and Scott McLaughlin both tested the Penske Porsche 963 in IMSA’s November test, so IndyCar fans were pretty excited about them having a crack at the 2026 Daytona 24. Instead, Penske went with three-driver lineups in both cars (including Laurin Heinrich, which rules), even though it is very normal for GTP teams — including Penske — to field four drivers in the 24-hour race.

I and many other observers find it a little strange to choose to stretch the drivers further when you’ve got two monsters raising their hand to jump in. That raises the question of whether the IndyCar guys couldn’t hack it this year, which Penske Racing President Jonathan Diuguid had to insist to press is not the case:

“The November test is difficult to glean performance stuff[,] but I think if you did glean performance [data], Josef and Scott were if not the top performing guys in those cars, they were on part with the guys we had there.”

(Newgarden, remember, was in the 2024 incarnation of this car and helped win Penske his first Rolex since 1969.)

Rather, Diuguid told Sportscar365, they decided to run three-driver squads for hand-wavey “administrative” reasons having something to do with driver seat time fairness, making fewer seat inserts, and fewer setup compromises.

To be clear, I absolutely believe this explanation to extent that I am already too bored to know the reasoning in more detail. I just always prefer the most fun driver lineup.

Scotty, we now know, does have a Rolex ride. Josef is not participating.

Obviously, I am thrilled that — as I predicted — Scotty Mac is back in a Corvette at Daytona, this time with DXDT Racing. The WeatherTech Corvette last year was one of the coolest lineups on track. SVG is taking the year off from the Rolex to concentrate on NASCAR and has said he regrets doing it last year ahead of his first full-time Cup season. Connor Zilisch is driving the #31 Cadillac and going to win the race. McLaughlin hasn’t covered himself in glory in a Corvette GT3 yet, but he’s quick, and he certainly could.

What bums me out is that Robert Wickens is not in the lineup, at least for Daytona. The story of his heroic return to racing in the sprint rounds with special hand controls to drive this car — and be quick about it — was one of the best IMSA storylines last year, and a full-time drive was clearly close to happening in 2026. Marshall Pruett actually said it was happening on Monday, in a post that also blew DXDT’s cover on announcing Scotty, but apparently either he was wrong or things changed. DXDT full-time driver Mason Filippi’s co-driver for the sprint rounds has not been announced yet, so hopefully that’s Wickens’ job again.

Following the example of the World Endurance Championship and its fine-happy sanctioning body, the FIA, IMSA has now updated its rules to forbid competitors from complaining about its balance of performance (BoP). Please enjoy article 2.2.3.a of the 2026 IMSA WeatherTech Championship sporting regulations:

“Manufacturers, Competitors, Drivers, Constructors, and any persons or entities associated with their entries must not attempt to influence the establishment of the Balance of Performance (BoP) or make any public comments regarding the BoP process, methodology, data, or outcomes, including but not limited to statements made through traditional media, digital media, or social media platforms.”

As in all motorsports series that employ censorship and fines, WEC teams now speak entirely in innuendos.

Actually, I’ve noticed IMSA competitors tend to tiptoe around BoP conversations already, as the series can make their racing lives miserable in other ways as punishment, such as by giving their car an unfavorable BoP. But now the gag order is in writing and violations costs money.

BoP is the most political part of sports car racing, and I honestly get why the series would want to prevent competitors from using the media as a weapon. While sanctioning bodies’ constant fiddling with BoP clearly causes stupid swings in competitive order throughout a season, teams are also blatantly dishonest about how they talk about BoP publicly, basically just doing whatever advantages them, as race teams are wont to do.

I think, on balance (😏), it’s the right thing to do balance lap times between cars of different makes and let their more particular strengths and weaknesses — and teams’ and drivers’ ability to execute — determine the winners and losers. I just wish the process wasn’t so fiddly, because it introduces errors all throughout the process, and that’s what competitors rightfully complain about. I am in favor of this BoP censorship policy in the meantime, but I want to see sports car racing regulators making tangible progress on finding less controversial ways to balance performance.

In a stage that was incredibly rough for many competitors, scrambling up the order, GRally Team KTM X-Bow #302 driver Puck Klaassen had an exceedingly clean third stage of the 2026 Dakar Rally, becoming the fifth woman ever to win a stage in the legendary race. It’s her third time contesting the Dakar and her second in current machinery; her first was in the Classic class in 2024 with her father, Sebastiaan.

I’m inaugurating the Turning Fortune News section with the announcement that Ayhancan Güven is returning to the Rolex 24 at Daytona for his second appearance, this time with legendary Porsche shop Manthey Racing. Manthey is the team with which Güven won the 2025 DTM championship in one of the most exciting last-lap battles I’ve ever seen:

Manthey is competing in IMSA for the first time in 2026 having dominated basically everywhere else Porsche 911 GT3s race. Güven is in one of two Manthey cars, most bad-assedly numbered #911 and #912; the champ is in the former alongside Thomas Preining, Ricardo Feller, and Klaus Bachler, all of whom are also fearsome drivers. After Daytona, Güven will head off for his new full-time job with Manthey’s World Endurance Championship team.

I would call Chan a “rising star” except clearly his star has already risen. Even aside from winning the toughest GT championship on Earth, his 2025 Daytona run with Wright in the #120 was fairly spectacular — they finished 2nd in GTD — so I can’t even imagine what’s coming this year.

The reason I chose this story to kick off News is that Chan is special to us from Daytona last year. Not only was the #120 the first race car to drive right past me, Güven starred in our first ever YouTube video because he was exceedingly generous with his time in the autograph line, giving Luke detailed answers to his questions. This year, I’m bringing a better microphone.