News

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.

[image or embed]

— John Newby (@johnnewby.bsky.social) Feb 5, 2026 at 8:54 AM

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.

I have not seen a single sign yet that Mick Schumacher is not going to be totally ready for his first IndyCar season. On the contrary, he sounds fascinated, engaged, and excited. I am eager to see the results.

McLaren seems fully ready for a new year of IndyCar. Their new 86,000 sq-ft shop is now open for business, and their three liveries managed to become distinguishable from one another.

I want to be very clear that I am almost entirely indifferent to this news, but there is one reason I’m glad to see it.

It seems to me that the people responsible for the almost-entirely-bad media decisions in motorsports have been slow-walking the actual test of the widespread conventional wisdom that people whose primary value is large audiences who watch their videos on social media can be taught to drive race cars and thereby benefit the sport. If I were using this theory to justify my salary as the cHiEf iNnoVAtiOn ofFicER at some racing series headquarters, I would be hesitant to test it, too, because if the influencers suck at driving, it would all fall apart.

Given that, I applaud the courage in letting these guys race in a NASCAR event on NASCAR’s biggest weekend, which is at the beginning of the year. It rips the band-aid off, and if they’re actually good, fine, they can do another race or two this year, and if they aren’t, now we will all finally know.

I feel obligated to follow up on my recent criticisms by reporting that Williams did indeed build a Formula 1 car this year, and it has indeed driven around on a race track, and it will indeed be on the grid in Australia.

FloRacing is possibly the only good deal in motorsports streaming, but surely that is a growth strategy that will not last forever. It is big news, therefore, that Flo has bulked up enough to expand into the Free Ad-Supported Streaming Television (FAST) market, which I’m actually beginning to believe might someday break the dam and liberate us from legacy broadcasting models. The FloRacing 24/7 channel — which is already available on the streaming service and is a good option when there’s nothing on live — will now be available on Prime Video and Fubo, i.e. on ways to watch streaming TV that a meaningful number of people already use.

NASCAR has already been an important partner with Flo, with lots of NASCAR Regional racing (including the Whelen Modified Tour) streaming there, and in related news, Flo will now simulcast some big races with NASCAR’s own FAST channel, which is really good, and which is now available right in the NASCAR mobile app in advance of this season. It’s finally almost easy to watch racing!

It is hard to win the title of worst streaming service in motorsports. The competition is so fierce. But to date, the fiawec.tv offering was definitely up there. Geoblocking in countries with TV agreements was the least of its worries; the app was terrible and the stream was unreliable. It wasn’t good at anything it was supposed to do, and it was too expensive. Today, though, that service is gone, and an info page explains that there will be a new FIA WEC+ streaming service this year with global rights. No geoblocks! What a concept!