GR Cup team BSI Racing was on the way to Circuit of the Americas for this weekend’s racing when its trailer caught fire 10 minutes after leaving the shop. After a small amount of luck and an incredible amount of hustle, they’re going to make it to the race just fine.

Former Formula 1 driver Nick Heidfeld has decided to get back into motor racing now that his kids are almost done leaving the nest, and he is doing so in a rather interesting way. Heidfeld has observed that there is no all-electric open-wheel feeder series to Formula E, so he has decided to start one, and he has come up with some business model gymnastics to — he believes — make it affordable enough to actually do.

It’s called the FG Series, which looks like it stands for many different things at once, and it says “affordable” right at the top, so you know it’s good. The model is that the series owns all the cars, and they run two championships at the same time, they rent the cars to teams, and they apparently hustle them back and forth between race meetings? I’m sorry, this seems insane. And they need “several million” more in investment. I will not be forking over.

I have been wondering about what Ford Racing’s new push for simplified and centralized branding — not to mention the encroachment of the Mustang Dark Horse into the territory of previously Shelby-branded performance Mustangs — means for Shelby American, and clearly I’m not alone in that.

Road & Track got a chance to ask Shelby president Gary Patterson about this, and while it was with the PR intent to brush it off, he did acknowledge that the relationship has waned. He says it’s a historical pattern and he feels about Ford and Shelby getting back together someday.

The glorious era when NASCAR raced “real stock cars” is almost entirely fictional, but that’s okay. There was a time when NASCAR had actual homologation rules, though, like you’re used to in sports car racing, which required OEMs to sometimes make a handful of plausibly road-legal versions of their race cars. Take, for example, this 1979 Dodge Magnum XE.

It’s no mystery why IMSA has surpassed NASCAR in YouTube subscribers — IMSA streams live racing on YouTube, NASCAR doesn’t — but it is surely remarkable that it is popular enough to have done so.

NASCAR does publish full races on YouTube, and they do so pretty quickly, but that’s not nearly as valuable as live streaming. I don’t know if NASCAR cares about this development, as they both own IMSA and care more about TV revenue, but I sure hope there comes a tipping point where even the racing people still watch on television proves to have value at least as great on YouTube.

Anybody who dips a toe into rallying discovers before long what amazing rally cars can be made out of Porsche 911s of various trims and generations, but I’m starting to think (read: hope) that this might just be a general principle. Ari Pettigrew of New Zealand has just successfully rally-converted a contemporary 911 GT3, and I really hope to see it in competition.

I am grateful to Divebomb’s Tarun Suresh for being mad enough to write this whole op-ed about Super GT completely abandoning international fans, so I didn’t have to write it myself.

There were convulsions of excitement earlier this year about Honda doing something with the Acura LMDh car, which some believed meant entering the FIA World Endurance Championship. Turns out it’s exactly the opposite: They’re pulling out of IMSA GTP and currently running the ARX-06 exactly nowhere in 2027. Will someone buy and run the cars privately? TBD.

It’s rough for the team, as the 93 car has just claimed its first win at the Acura Grand Prix of Long Beach, which is obviously something Acura would have liked to have done sooner.

What Honda is doing instead with the Acura racing budget is putting more Acura branding on Honda stuff at IndyCar races. I guess that makes sense. More importantly, it shows that they have decided to commit to IndyCar after waffling for the past few years, and I’ll take it. GTP has plenty of OEMs, and more are on the way.

Meanwhile, cue silly season: Renger van der Zande, Colin Braun, and Tom Blomqvist are on the market. And what about Kakunoshin Ohta? What about Scott Dixon and Álex Palou?? This story is sure to make waves on the driver side of things.

In the run-up to the Acura Grand Prix of Long Beach, a lot of IndyCar media and industry people were eager to make the case that this is IndyCar’s other mythic race. I think it’s unquestionable that if there is another race event on the calendar that deserves its own legendary status besides the Indy 500, it’s Long Beach. It looks incredible. If I still lived in LA, I would go every year.

Unfortunately, no amount of surrounding spectacle can change the competitive reality of the series. Felix Rosenqvist put it on pole, everybody got too excited, and then yet another team failed to avoid losing to Álex Palou. Palou was possibly even more delightfully joyous than usual about it all, but Rosenqvist was desolate with second, and even despite his first podium of the year, Scott Dixon described his race as “blah.” Yes, all three cars on the podium were either Chip Ganassi-run or Chip Ganassi-supported. There were some races further back in the field, but the fact is that — still, somehow — nobody has anything for the 10 team.

I wouldn’t sound so downbeat about the race if there weren’t also classic IndyCar footguns aplenty. Will Power ran over the feet of 4 car crew member Ryan Marzec (he’s fine), and the tower mistakenly gave the whole field push-to-pass on a restart, and half of them used it, which is against the rules, but because the only pass that happened was by people who were both using it, the official statement was that those canceled each other out, so no penalties were awarded. Amazing job, premier American open-wheel racing series.

(Note: Some people are eager to relate this to the Penske push-to-pass scandal in 2024, which was penalized, but those people are wrong. Penske hacked the control software on their cars. This was some IndyCar Race Control person pushing the wrong button and giving it to everyone. Incomparable scenarios.)

Despite the predictable outcome, Long Beach continued IndyCar’s streak of great TV ratings. This one was presumably because Fox aired a NASCAR race right beforehand and absolutely irradiated it with IndyCar commercials. Hey, I’m not complaining.

PremiAir Racing is a midfield Supercars team right now, but they must have serious potential, or they wouldn’t have attracted the services of literally Roland Dane to run the team this year. They aren’t off to a start he’d be super proud of, though; PremiAir is 10th in the teams’ championship, Jayden Ojeda is P14 in the drivers’, and Declan Fraser is P18.

Ostensibly in order to concentrate on their full-season entries, the team has canceled plans to run Nash Morris — a very promising prospect in Super2 and one of PremiAir’s enduro co-drivers — as a wildcard in the Ipswich Super440, the last race of the Sprint Cup portion of the season.

The process of spinning off IndyCar officiating so that it can be independently overseen instead of directly run by Penske Entertainment — whose owner also directly runs three race cars in the series — has been somewhat plodding, but it has at least been completed ahead of the Indy 500. The appointment of Raj Nair, Ray Evernham and Ronan Morgan as the Independent Officiating Board (IOB) happened a while ago, allowing them to do all the necessary homework, but many races into the 2026 season, they still hadn’t done the main thing, which was to hire a managing director of officiating (MDO) for the series.

They took their time and looked at a bunch of candidates — which is clearly a good thing — and now they have selected Scot Elkins, who was the technical director of operations for the Champ Car World Series from 2005–2008, and he has experience in officiating and regulations with basically every kind of top-level racing on Earth. Seems like an ideal choice.

Now I’m embarrassed because I was so sure Daniel Dye would never race in NASCAR again after being fired by Kaulig for being a homophobic idiot on the internet — not to mention being on the support ticket at an IndyCar race and not knowing who a Penske IndyCar driver was — but apparently in NASCAR there’s always someone willing to pick up the pieces and help somebody fail upwards.

This time it’s Live Fast Motorsports, BJ and Jessica McLeod’s family shop. Last year, they were the good guys who gave Katherine Legge her shot in the 78 Cup car. This year, they’re putting this dumbass in it at both Talladega races, Pocono, and summer Daytona. Can’t wait to see a young man of such caliber drive a NextGen.

My heart goes out to those affected by the violent rollover of a Volkswagen Polo R5 that clipped an embankment during Round 2 of the FIA CODASUR Rally Championship at Rally Sudamericano Mina Clavero. One spectator was killed, others were injured, and the driver and co-driver were unharmed.

The British Touring Car Championship season has begun, with new cars on the grid and a new qualifying race format. The racing is great as always, and the results at the Donington Park opening weekend were a little surprising. Tom Ingram, reigning champion, was disqualified by tech after winning the first race, and his car blew up just as the second race started, making way for some challengers. Ash Sutton won the second and third races, putting him at the top of the pile after round 1.

This is a cool one. Brandon Carr is 18 years old and a huge Jeff Gordon fan. He moved to the U.S. from England three years ago, and two years ago he started dirt racing. This year, he will run the full season of USAC NOS Energy Drink Midget National Championship with Keith Kunz/Curb-Agajanian Motorsports. That’s 29 races. And Carr also races pavement late models. In March, he was the first winner in the new IHRA pro late model series.

Abel Motorsports confirms that prodigal son Jacob will return to contest the Indy 500 with them. As you recall, Abel had a full-season seat at Dale Coyne Racing last year, and he was the one person bumped from the 500 in a total cluster-f of a Bump Day run plan that was brutal to watch. This year, apparently Romain Grosjean had to come back, so Abel is not running the season, but it will be good to see him get a shot at redemption.

As for the question of whether there will be a Bump Day this year, this makes 32 confirmed entries for the 33 grid spots. The Katherine Legge ride with Foyt that many have sussed out has not been announced yet, but with no Colton Herta at Andretti, I haven’t heard anything else credible out there.

The FIA, Formula 1, drivers, and teams have settled on adjustments to the 2026 regulations over the unfortunate but probably also quite helpful spring break. The headlines are as follows: recharge limits will be reduced in qualifying (from 8MJ to 7MJ), so that it’s optimal to run more of the lap flat out rather than slowing to recharge in weird places. Complementing that is an increase in the recharge allowance (from 250kW to 350kW) during “super clipping,” which is the cute name for revving the engine at low speeds to charge the battery. This will reduce the need for lift-and-coast recovery, which can slow cars down on the straights in ways that are difficult to see and predict from behind.

There are also safety changes with energy deployment to help cars that are slow off the line to accelerate quicker, as well as caps to boost during races that will mitigate the kinds of dangerous closing speeds we’ve seen (and which drivers were warning everyone about since the earliest, vaguest dream of these regulations). The patterns of lights on the rear of cars to indicate what the car is doing have also been clarified.

All of this will help, and it’s a cool quality of all this added influence of electric drive and braking that it can be adjusted so precisely as more data is gathered about the racing. Combined with the teams getting to work way harder on development than they were expecting to when the season started, it’s going to be fascinating to see what happens in Miami after this long break is over.

No one races on the Nürburgring Nordschliefe without knowing its reputation. It’s a dangerous place. That probably only adds to its allure for racing drivers, and that’s why it has such strict licensing and qualifying requirements and mandates so much track time before admitting drivers to its most competitive races, primarily the 24-hour GT race. But the NLS is also — still, if to a diminishing extent — a holdout for the original spirit of road racing: that anyone who dares to show up with competitive equipment deserves a chance to earn their starting spot. This tension sometimes results in tragedy, but that is the tragic tension of motor racing itself.

That tension allows enthusiasts like 66-year-old Juha Miettinen to race the Nordschliefe, and it also puts them in situations such as the one in which he found himself, when (it is suspected) fluids dropped by another car caused a seven-car pile-up at Klostertal, and Miettinen — driving the #121 BMW 325i — lost his life.

Miettinen was a serious enthusiast of sports car racing in general and the Nürburgring in particular, having competed multiple times in the N24 and other events there since 2018, always in a BMW 325i. He loved this place, as all his fellow competitors do, whether they were Formula 1 world champions or devoted amateurs like he was.

The first day’s 24H Qualifiers race was red-flagged for the accident and not resumed. A minute of silence in memory of Miettinen was observed during the formation lap for the following day’s race, which was won by the #16 Scherer Sport PHX Audi R8 LMS GT3, driven by Christopher Haase, Alexander Sims, and Ben Green. The #3 Mercedes-AMG GT3 of Max Verstappen and Lucas Auer charged to the front early under Verstappen’s command, but mysterious front splitter damage sidelined them in the garage and took them out of contention. Verstappen insists he didn’t hit anything.

The racing goes on, but this year’s N24 will be raced in Miettinen‘s memory. I hope to see many tributes to him at the race.

The FIA World Endurance Championship was the biggest racing series to have to delay the start of its year due to the war in Iran, so it needed a strong opening round to get back on its feet. It definitely got one.

Antonio Giovinazzi put the #51 Ferrari on pole in the closest Hyperpole session in the championship’s history, and then there was a race at the front from lights to flag. It was won by the #8 Toyota of Brendon Hartley, Ryo Hirakawa and Sebastien Buemi, giving the once-dominant marque its 50th WEC victory. Ferrari can be beaten, and it will be a fun fight to watch.

In LMGT3, a WRT BMW won (shocker), but it shouldn’t have. Garage 59’s step up to WEC almost began in glorious fashion. The McLaren snatched pole and led late into the race before conking out with an alternator issue. I expect them to get much more airtime this year.

NASCAR’s Kansas weekend was okay, but it could have been incredible if not for the ever-stupid overtime rule giving the Cup Series another pull on the slot machine. It was a fairly boring run-up, but the end of the race found #11 Denny Hamlin racing his own car, the #45 of Tyler Reddick. It was a moment of incredible drama that then peaked as Reddick had some sort of drop-out and briefly lost control, letting Hamlin around. As Denny raced to the white flag, Cody Ware — racing for absolutely nothing — spun all by himself, leading to an overtime finish that spared Tyler Reddick (who would go on to win), screwed Denny Hamlin, and somehow allowed Kyle Larson to have a go. At least we avoided that far more unjust outcome.

The O’Reilly race was won by Taylor Gray and featured a terrifying flip by Carson Kvapil on lap 2, dampening his good run of form (he was unhurt). The ARCA race was won by Gio Ruggiero, but there was a better headline. There were four women in the field, and three of them finished in the top 10: Lanie Buice (P5), Jade Avedisian (P7), and Dystany Spurlock (P10). It was Avedisian’s first 1.5-mile track! Isabella Robusto was running 11th when Garrett “Cleetus McFarland” Mitchell’s motor blew up in front of her and spewed oil all over the track, causing Robusto to skid into the wall.