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.

After 10 seasons, 132 starts, 38 podiums, and 15 wins, Mitch Evans has decided to leave Jaguar TCS Racing. He is joining the Opel team that will debut next season. Everybody is being nice about it, and the transition seems orderly. It hasn’t been announced yet, but The Race reports that test and development driver Stoffel Vandoorne will take the seat as was apparently the plan when he took that reserve job, the Evans/Opel deal having been in the works for a long time.

This is an early loud noise in a Formula E silly season that might get super, super silly. The Gen4 car is coming next season, which begins at the end of 2026, so any established driver who thinks the grass might be greener somewhere else had better get a move on. Jake Dennis, notably, decided to stay put at Andretti, and in the TWG era, staying in their open-wheel system does seem like a shrewd career move. Mitch Evans would rather roll the dice on a brand new program.

Cadillac Hertz Team JOTA driver Alex Lynn had a planned operation to address an ongoing neck problem with time to recover before the 24 Hours of Le Mans. He will miss the 6 Hours of Spa while recovering, and IMSA Wayne Taylor Racing driver Louis Deletraz will step in. He has not raced in WEC outside of Le Mans since 2023, when he won the LMP2 championship for Team WRT alongside Robert Kubica and Rui Andrade.

As I continue to insist no matter what Class 1 nostalgists say, the DTM is the best GT3 racing series on Earth, and that makes it worth the switch. I’ve figured out why that is, too. Precisely because of its glorious history, the DTM reached such a high level of funding, quality, and competition that it made GT3 a perfect financial compromise. It’s the only series in the world where they can afford to prepare the cars to the most perfect possible extent and afford to crash them into each other. That has attracted the world’s best GT3 manufacturers and drivers to compete, and its race format is perfectly calibrated to make that as entertaining as it sounds.

The Red Bull Ring is such a good track to start the season at, and both races were great. Maro Engel almost won both of them, but he had a bad stop in race 1 that Thomas Preining took advantage of in his Manthey Porsche. Maro got his the next day. It was his first DTM win since 2023.

Following unsuccessful efforts fielding a car with Hendrick Motorsports for Kyle Larson at the Indy 500, Arrow McLaren has continued its NASCAR connection by partnering with Legacy Motor Club on the fourth car being driven at Indy this year by Ryan Hunter-Reay. This reunites Tony Kanaan and Jimmie Johnson, who were of course Chip Ganassi Racing teammates, only this time they’re the bosses.

This has major “Year 1 of N” vibes to it. RHR is, obviously, a safe pair of hands, but Jimmie Johnson has been about as vocal as he gets (not super vocal) about wanting to do more with Legacy Motor Club besides run okay in the Cup Series. It’s great that there is still a fast-flowing pipeline for NASCAR team members to do some IndyCar racing after the conclusion of the Hendrick deal. My question is, is Jimmie looking to bring some drivers over in coming years?

Talladega was its typical self this weekend: Epic for real stock cars and a good physics lesson for NextGen cars. What was newsworthy about this Talladega gathering were its stars: Carson Hocevar, Corey Day, Andy Jankowiak, and the ARCA Menards Series itself.

Each of the winners at ’Dega this round won his first race in his respective championship. Carson Hocevar’s win was a long time coming, and I think it’s a big moment for the sport that he got it at this track, in this paint job, with this absolutely legendary celebration. It was the first win in O’Reilly for Corey Day, who cuts a similar figure to Hocevar: an obsessive dirt racer who has blown into NASCAR and made a bit of a mess, but whose talent cannot be denied, and who everyone knows will be dangerous once they clean things up. Don’t look now, but they both might have gotten to that point.

But for me, as an old guy who’s still got it, the most enjoyable winner of the weekend was Andy “Andy J” Jankowiak, the pizza guy from Buffalo, who won his first ARCA race in his 48th start. His dreamy disbelief was so delightful to me, and I immediately bought a hat and a shirt.

His chill demeanor belies a very sharp race. He did exactly what he was supposed to do at Talladega and was hanging out just behind the leaders on the last lap. This was supposed to be Garrett “Cleetus McFarland” Mitchell’s big ‘Dega win, according to the narrative machinery, and it almost was. Now, I should pause here and say that I think Cleetus is genuinely good for ARCA racing because he’s getting people to watch it — which they didn’t really have any reason to before — and he’s reasonably capable at it. He should just stay here and do this for another year or two. However, he got too excited there at the end and tried to block the entire race track from the front, and this allowed Andy J to absolutely punk the field and win.

ARCA is getting good at the front. It’s also by far the national racing series with the most women in it, and they all kick ass. I say we should all watch more ARCA. If we keep its standards high, it will reward us.

It is a heartache for me that the cars and tracks are so stout in Trans Am and the competition is so thin. Other guys occasionally give Matt Brabham a run for his money in the TA class, but he’s always around. Meanwhile in TA2, Helio Meza has not lost a race since the middle of last year.

I am no fan of Fox’s NASCAR broadcasts or broadcasters — is anyone? — and that is one of the hardest things about enjoying the Truck Series, as that’s the only one that stays on Fox all year. That said, I am looking forward to Kaulig and Ram’s latest stunt, which is to get Clint Bowyer and Jamie McMurray out of the booth and into their #25 free agent truck. Bowyer will run Dover on May 15, and lucky McMurray gets to run the Naval Base Coronado street race on June 19.

I am a fan of this because all the likely outcomes are entertaining. If Kaulig/Ram deliver their typical clown show, it will be funny. If the old guys run well, honestly, I think that allows them to gain some stature in the booth, which they could both use.

Great Wall Motor, a large Chinese automaker that primarily sells trucks and SUVs, is getting in on the burgeoning party of Chinese firms who want to go racing on the global stage. They’re launching a new brand called GF (which stands for “Great Faith”), and they’ve developed a 4.0L twin-turbo V8 intended for a plug-in hybrid supercar they’re positioning against the Ferrari SF90 and the Toyota GR GT. While they’re at it, they reckon, they might as well build a GT3 car for it.

The 2026 FIA World Rally Championship has two things going for it: One is that rally onboards in these places are always 100% worth watching in full, no matter how the performance compares to anyone else. This is the highest level of motorsport for people who just enjoy the art of driving, and that makes it worthwhile no matter what.

The other is that at least Toyota is stacked with unbelievable drivers, because the only competition they have in this championship right now is amongst themselves.

Canarias is a pavement rally with endless awesome views, so it’s a good place to jump in for people who like road racing. That also means they’re pushing their asses off, and there were some pretty serious over-the-limit moments in this event. Indeed, it was decided by one. The old champ, Seb Ogier, was in classic form, but young Oliver Solberg was coming for him, trying to revive the miracle season it looked like he would have early on. On the penultimate stage, Solberg was in the barrier, and that sealed it for Ogier.

Previous Toyota hot-streak driver Takamoto Katsuta won the populist superspecial stage in the Gran Canaria football stadium, and I have to say, I could have done without that. Obviously the point was to make it possible for local folks to watch rally cars burn more rubber than they’d be able to see standing on one bluff all day to see each car blast by once. It wasn’t great TV, though, compared to actual rallying, and the drivers were all saying the one weird little “jump” in the stadium track nearly blew their backs out. They kind of sounded like 2026 Formula 1 drivers: “That was terrible, but hopefully the fans liked it.”

The IndyCar charter system hasn’t really amounted to anything so far, unless you count causing Prema’s non-chartered two-car team to fold after one year despite putting a car on pole at the Indy 500.

IndyCar does not currently have a problem filling a grid, but the industry — not to mention the race car — has been quite stagnant for a long time, and there is near universal agreement that it’s too financially strapped to move much. Something must be done to reward the investment of going IndyCar racing, and charters are working wonders in NASCAR (now that the lawsuit is over). Now the key is that IndyCar charters actually have to become valuable.

IndyCar has a cultural tension it will never be able to resolve, so it should stop trying. It has always been an elite sport — motor racing in general and open-wheel racing in particular always have been and always will be — but IndyCar comes from a region that is culturally humble, the sport has always valued getting covered in grease wrenching on your own car, and it has had a tendency — which has waxed and waned over decades of industry evolution — to let upstarts into the field to see how they stack up against the big guys. Even though it costs millions of dollars and millions of engineering hours to be any kind of serious IndyCar team nowadays, the culture does not want to give up those affectations.

Nevertheless, IndyCar has buried the news ahead of the Month of May Deluge that it will no longer allow unchartered entries in races other than the Indianapolis 500. People I know are pissed about this. I’m not sure why. I don’t see any evidence that anybody even wants to race in IndyCar outside the 500 except massive global race teams like Prema, and from all appearances, they just misunderstood or mistimed their ability to get charters by showing up first with a couple IndyCars and going racing.

The teams who are in the series now — plus the two manufacturers who will be granted charters when the new car comes online in 2028 — have made unspeakably massive investments in keeping the IndyCar Series going into the 21st century, when it was by no means clear that it would. I see the argument that if someone new wants to get into the championship, they should do it by paying back one of the teams that’s in it now. It’s not like there isn’t an abundance of chartered cars that are only entered because doofuses like Sting Ray Robb have people willing to pay for them. Surely Wright Motorsports or somebody like that will someday be able to convince one of these teams to part ways with a charter or two.

It would be a different story, though, if this arrangement included the 500. You have to let people come take a swing at the Indy 500. That’s the one event where it is even theoretically financially possible for them to find sponsorship to do so, and it’s part of the grand tradition of the greatest race in the world. That’s why the series is called IndyCar. It’s not called PortlandCar.

Subaru is basically known to the world as a car brand because of the WRX, which is the model that has defined its history in rallying. Subaru isn’t in the top levels of rally anymore, but the WRX S4 still competes in the All-Japan Rally Championship. Subaru is replacing that car — built to the JP4 rules — in the upcoming Nara round May 8–10 with a surprising body: the BRZ.

They’re calling it the BRZ Spec.Z, and it really is a rally car in terms of engine, drive, and gearbox. It’s interesting that Subaru feels this model has the kind of pull that it should not just run as a high-downforce sports car in Super GT but also as a dirty off-road gremlin.

It can’t be denied that the introduction of the new Toyota Supra in Supercars this year has been a smashing success. If anybody in this series is worried about their car’s ability to win, it’s Chevrolet teams.

With its program for bringing OEMs into the series in the Gen3 era thus proven, Supercars interim(?) CEO Barclay Nettlefold says they’re looking out for another one. And doesn’t that sound great? Having a ton of brands on track is a hallmark of the greatest periods of Australian touring car racing.

In the wake of the sudden departure of Jonathan Wheatley — whose next job we are eagerly waiting to hear about, in case it’s at Aston Martin — Audi F1 has come up with a solution that I think should settle fears about a first-season implosion, although some people seem not to get this choice. They’ve hired legendary Audi driver and team manager Allan McNish.

I don’t understand what’s not to get, honestly. He’s been there for all kinds of other new Audi works racing ventures. It would only make more sense if he’d been there all along.

In epochal news that caps off a year of massive structural change (and lawsuit defeats) at NASCAR, Jim France will step down as CEO and hand over control to current president Steve O’Donnell, who will become the first non-France to lead the company.

Heir apparent (and family member) Ben Kennedy will be promoted to chief operating officer, which is a great shout. Kennedy is a racer, and not just in the former driver sense. He likes to go to the races, and doing so gives him good ideas. He will be a fitting leader of the sport someday, and it will be good for him to warm up by mastering its operations.

The press conference announcing the changes is planned for tomorrow at Talladega Superspeedway as part of the race weekend.

Formula 1 has announced a five-year deal to bring back the Turkish Grand Prix at Istanbul Park. It is one of the great modern F1 circuits, and it definitely belongs on the calendar. Does it belong on the calendar every year more than Spa does? Rhetorical question.

Supercars really does have the goods to become an international motorsport; I deeply believe that. The question is whether it has to bring the racing on a world tour in order to do so.

Previous efforts to get some East Asia rounds on the calendar have faltered, but new interim(?) CEO Barclay Nettlefold is reorganizing the project. He has set up a dedicated committee for exploring all options for Supercars to race internationally. He won’t say who’s on it, either, which is tantalizing.

The thing is, the teams seem to be pretty maxed out with the number of rounds they already have, there are new Australian events on the table, and going international at the expense of the domestic sport is a red line. It will be interesting to see if they can make it pencil out. I’m biased, obviously, but I think NASCAR country would love to see how it’s done back where SVG came from.