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.
So, hiring a legend like Pappas is a good sign that Coyne is confident in its 2026 program. Where on Earth, though, is the hiring news about its second driver? Cars are already at Sebring!
Our favorite small race car driver, 2025 F1 Academy champion Doriane Pin, is returning to sports cars this season, joining the Duqueine Team in LMP2 for the European Le Mans Series. I am all in favor of Doriane continuing to raise her profile in sports cars, especially if Mercedes can finally be convinced to go prototype racing, but I also believe it’s a good place for her to be while we see if the hands of fate deal her a Formula 1 seat.
The racing has been pretty great in the multi-week short-track extravaganza known as the World Series of Asphalt at Florida’s New Smyrna Speedway. NASCAR Whelen Modified Tour veteran and occasional national-series starter Justin Bonsignore finally notched a win at the tour’s season opener there. Rising stock car star Jade Avedisian won the 60-lap super late model race, and she’s also running in the big game with the ASA STARS National Tour on Tuesday night.
After picking up their fourth straight race win in the first four-hour bout of the Abu Dhabi doubleheader that ends the Asian Le Mans Series, the CrowdStrike by APR #04 LMP2 did what it needed to do in the last race to win the championship, securing an automatic invitation to the 24 Hours of Le Mans. Having seen them win in Daytona and then have that amazing run, consider me fully invested.
Hey, he’s a talented race car driver, I’ve heard of him, it’s all good. Sounds like Ram’s getting away with its antics and not ending up giving a full-season ride to some doofus who won a popularity contest.
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.
I find it funny that it took so long for NASCAR to ban drivers from using their hands to create aerodynamic effects in qualifying. Honestly, I’m perfectly okay with it as a technique, but also, I get it. “Rules” and ”fairness” and ”safety” and all that.
I figure people were right to doubt that the Cadillac F1 program would be able to enter its first season with its act together, given how that typically went even in eras of dramatically less technical and logistical complexity. But I’m starting to feel like that traditionalist view also misses how much higher the level of professionalism is now in F1 as an industry. Cadillac has seemingly done everything on time, and the GM power unit program coming online in 2029 is reportedly ahead of schedule, if you can believe that.
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.
I’m sure it’s perfectly normal and chill for a kid with a seat at a top F3 team to switch teams one month before the season starts, right? Prema couldn’t be completely disappearing, right? Right??
All I can say is, I believe them. I have been to some crowded things — including last year’s Rolex 24 — and this was more crowded. IMSA reports 180,000 people attended, and 1.1 million people watched on TV, which is what NASCAR and F1 typically get. That is huge. Hooray for sports car racing.
While it still may be too late to do anything about it, the new development in the F1 2026 compression ratio saga is that Red Bull seems to have swung to the opposition side after the Barcelona shakedown. I guess they saw that Mercedes cheated better than they did, and now the only rational thing to do is defect. This makes it theoretically possible for teams to vote to change the testing method to something — which still has not been specified by anyone, as far as I’m aware — that can catch the increased compression ratio at running temperature before final homologation on March 1.
It sounds like the meetings at IndyCar HQ about what to do about Prema have reached excruciating levels of specificity while they wait for answers. At this point, it’s virtually assured that Prema will miss the first race, but Boles & co. are holding the door open as long as possible for them to pull together a mostly-full-season entry as some new entity. Chances of that happening are pretty grim without a charter on offer, though, and Boles says that rather than let teams fight over Prema’s two grid spots for one-offs every round, they’d rather just reduce the grid to 25. What a shame that would be.
There are few events in the world with cars this amazing on them. I’m still trying to figure out how to write or talk about Pikes Peak, and I may have to go in person before I truly can, but the basic truth of it is this: It is one of the purest displays I’ve ever seen of the symbiotic individuality of car and driver.
I consider this supporting evidence for one of my boldest NASCAR predictions, and I might as well put it on record here on the site: I am convinced that General Motors is going to plunk down the money to accelerate Connor Zilisch’s career — possibly towards the Cadillac Formula 1 team — by getting him into the Hendrick Motorsports #48 as soon as it becomes available. People don’t buy it because they think Justin Marks and Trackhouse are going to be able to hang onto him. I do not believe they will be able to make him champion quickly enough.
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.
After nearly a week of weather delays, NASCAR finally forced the Clash to happen last night, and from the beginning of practice to just past halfway through the race, we were looking at a classic. The last-chance qualifier was one of the best short-track races the NextGen car has ever put on, for my money. In the main event, exciting prospects such as Shane van Gisbergen and Connor Zilisch looked to be in strong positions, especially as the weather got dicier. There was some drama about whether they could keep going, NASCAR declared the race wet, everybody changed tires, and we more or less thought NASCAR had finally found its balls and had set us up for an all-timer.
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.
Kyle Larson started on pole, but he ended like this:
Forgot to post last night. This car has seen some things.
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.
Following on the news that McLaren is getting out of GT4 racing to concentrate on launching its hypercar and reviving its GT3 program, McLaren Automotive’s head of motorsport Giorgio Sanna has made some fairly concrete-ish promises that we’ll learn about a new GT3 car this year that will not be another evo of the 720S. I might feel slightly let down if it’s just the 750S GT3. I want to see McLaren Automotive enter a new phase as it goes to the top class.
