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This is a pretty wild year-over-year improvement in quality for the Nürburgring Langstrecken-Serie. Is it because everybody wants to beat Max Verstappen? (I mean, probably.)

Renee Gracie won the Am class in GTWC Australia last year, and this year she is returning to Pro-Am and trading Audi for Ferrari. She has secured the pro services of none other than Supercars legend Will Davison. Will this be the most popular sports car in Australia?

This is awesome, but I just feel like the Australian landscape is a little confused. Supercars is an incredible — and incredibly competitive — series, so it makes sense that there are many worlds in which drivers can make names for themselves and hopefully get noticed by the main game. What’s weird is that the Trans Am and TA2 series (which both run the TA2 car in Australia) are wildly popular in their own right, and Super2 is not. I guess Super2 is more relevant operationally to Supercars, but it’s arguably not in terms of cars or racing.

Anyway, MSR is running all of these cars, and I say hell yeah to that.

Modern-day Formula 1 may be unrecognizable in some ways compared to its past, but there are still many things about it that are as Formula 1 as ever. The hype circus and underlying chaos behind the Spanish Grand Prix’s new Madrid street circuit — catchily dubbed “the Madring” — is exactly such a thing. Big deals being done on vague promises, concerning lacks of urgency or, like, actual work… it’s got all the makings of a classic fiasco.

And don’t forget the absurd race track! Get a load of turn 10, a.k.a. “Valdebebas.”

Can’t hurt to ask, I guess.

Reporters asked BMW M CEO Frank van Meel if he’s thought about going back to Formula 1 now that Audi and Cadillac are in and Mercedes is wiping the floor with everybody. He said, “The answer is no,” arguing that, despite the obvious marketing benefits, there wouldn’t be enough relevant technology transfer to their consumer vehicles.

That’s quite a take considering that BMW M is still working very hard on its hybrid LMDh car in top-level endurance racing. Van Meel says that one is plenty road-relevant. He also, though, “think[s] this year is going to be the first one in Formula One that there’s a hybrid system,” though, so don’t assume the guy knows what he’s talking about. (Formula 1’s first year with a hybrid power unit was 2014.)

Haters may stay mad, but race 2 will demonstrate that one of the great innovations of the 2026 Formula 1 regulations is that the greater emphasis on electric power enables more ways to fine-tune the competition via the rules. Race 1 was objectively great despite being on one of the most extremely energy-constrained tracks of the year, so I’m excited to see how things go in a place with more braking and shorter straights.

The rules on energy harvesting and deployment are among the first FIA documents to come out each race week, and they contain a few stats that make the rationale clear. One is the “power-limited distance,” meaning the amount of the lap where the cars are accelerating or at top speed and deploying electrical energy. Shanghai’s is 0.4km less than Melbourne’s despite the circuit being 0.18km longer. Drivers are on the brakes more — and harder — throughout the lap. Correspondingly, all of the recharge and deployment limits, both for qualifying and the race, are significantly more generous.

I’ve noticed that some people are still unwilling to admit that the 2026 F1 rules are awesome. Well, during Bahrain pre-season testing, I didn’t see even the most hardline orthodox anti-hybrid person complaining about Ferrari’s flippy-dippy rear wing they trotted out for a day.

Of course, I, like many others, expected it was just an experiment, and sure enough it did not appear in Australia, but here it is. The plan is to run it in practice and then make the decision about whether to qualify for the Sprint with it.

Conor has transformed over the past couple years from someone I felt was fake-macho and annoying to a pretty deep, sensitive, humble guy. Taking such a licking in your career as a professional racing driver will do that to you, I guess. He has all the hustle to land great sponsors, and he certainly has enough ability as a driver to stay in the series compared to some of these other knuckleheads. He just hasn’t been able to land the fish.

DRR is clearly a great team for him to run the 500 with while he figures it out, and they are rumored to be targeting 2028 to get into the series full-time with the new car in 2028. He seems like a shoo-in for their veteran driver if he is able to work on the program with them starting now. Landing ARCO to sponsor the team is a pretty solid start.

Gotta say, I am not feeling any less worried about Alex Bowman. Hendrick is making it sound like he’s getting better but still isn’t quite there, but this is now three races affected by these symptoms.

At any rate, Anthony Alfredo had a pretty good run in the #48 at Phoenix before getting taken out. I would love to see Justin Allgaier get some redemption at Vegas for his Daytona 500 appearance.

This has been long speculated about, but more official, corporate-sounding noises are being made about Chinese car giant BYD going racing. They will, of course, go directly to the highest levels in Formula 1 or FIA WEC — or both? — at least in their minds, until they learn how motorsport works.

Bring it on. I hope they crank up the competition in motorsports as much as they are in making good road cars that people actually want and can afford.

When I was in middle school my public favorite band was Limp Bizkit. That was the one I thought projected the way I wanted to be seen. My secret favorite band, though, was Korn. That was the music that actually spoke to my soul, which I did not want anyone to see or hear from.

Nowadays, I am pursuing things — very publicly, too — that I definitely would have thought were cool in middle school but could never have admitted. I never allowed myself to explore, for example, NASCAR because it would have been deeply uncool. At our school, we made fun of NASCAR and people who liked NASCAR.

Well, now I know better, and now Jonathan Davis will wave the green flag at the Cup race in Vegas this weekend, and I will be smiling.

My favorite Lamborghini, the Wall Racing Huracan, placed fifth in class at the Bathurst 12 Hour this year after a best finish of P9 in last year’s outings, so they’ve decided to contest the full season of GT World Challenge Australia. Surely it helped having works driver Marco Mapelli fresh off the Daytona 24 to run the Mountain, but the team also says they’ve just dialed in their operations this year.

It would be fun to see some solid results for the Huracan in the year when the Temerario is rolling out. Pfaff Motorsports — Mapelli’s team for his IMSA endurance outings — will be debuting its Temerario at the 12 Hours of Sebring March 18–21, their goal being simply to finish the famously bumpy race.

I don’t want to make all 2026 NLS stories about one thing, but raise your hand if you would like to see Ayhancan Güven race against Max Verstappen.

*every hand on Earth goes up*

Max is not participating in the NLS until round 2, but his car and co-drivers will be there. I can’t wait to see how they stack up against this monster Grello duo. To be very clear, Manthey has not yet said they are sending this car to the N24… but they totally are, right?

Hyundai is clearly behind the eight ball in WRC this year, but at least they aren’t the only ones. It is difficult to imagine anyone catching up with Toyota even just two rallies in, but Hyundai reports that they’re flat out on drivability upgrades that will begin to roll out by the Croatia Rally that starts April 10. Unfortunately for us Hyundai-heads, talking to the press about this now seems like an effort to get out in front of expectations for Kenya and set them to “low.”

Ligier insists that there is a market for GT2 cars and racing as defined in the present day. The way they sell it is “GT3 levels of performance at GT4 levels of cost.” Now, the word “performance” is doing a lot of work there, because all they really mean is power. A GT2 car cannot corner like a GT3 car can. What it can do is go straight very fast.

Look, I understand why rich racing enthusiasts want to do that. If they want to race them against each other, go ahead. What I don’t want is for this GT2 spec to start creeping into multi-class sport car racing. They would be hazardous. Even if these people are rich enough to bring a pro driver along with them for a long race, the am time in a car as fast as the outright leaders — but only in a straight line — is going to be a mess.

People still hate on F1 Academy, but I understand their reasons less and less every day. People complain that it’s not a real “path” to Formula 1 for these women, which I guess it does seem like it promises to be, but if you talk to Susie Wolff about it, the objectives are so much broader than that, and it’s smashing them. They decided that the most important move to address gender disparities in motor racing is to make young, aspiring female drivers very visible in the world, and putting them in F1-looking cars at F1 races is obviously the way to do that. Wolff and her team often cite FIA karting statistics that show enormous leaps in registrations from girls following the launch of F1 Academy, and I don’t see how you could argue with those results.

But the next layer of the objection always seems to be that this is about marketing rather than racing, and usually they cite as evidence the fact that Formula 4 cars are not the best or most challenging race cars in the world. Well, I would like to invite such critics to race one against these women. Now that we’re enough years in for F1 Academy graduates to start forging grown-up racing careers, one after another is revealing that she is not aspiring to be an Instagram influencer but rather a racing driver.

This is the greatest such story yet, to my eye. Lia Block is doing a full American Rally Association season in a Hyundai i20 N Rally2 car, and she’s making quite clear that her ambition is to contest the FIA World Rally Championship. Her father, of course, was Ken Block, so it runs in the family. To lose your father in an off-road vehicle crash and stay on your path towards being a professional driver is no small or simple thing. She knows exactly what she’s getting into, and she intends to do it at the highest level.

My immediate reaction to the presidential decree that there shall be a Freedom 250 IndyCar race on the streets of Washington, D.C. is on the record: I doubt it’s going to happen. I don’t think IndyCar had any choice but to agree to give it a go — and I believe Roger Penske is firmly supportive of it, anyway — but they will look like fools when it either doesn’t come to pass or is an unmitigated disaster, and that’s just IndyCar’s fate.

Well, the first concrete step towards doing it is complete, and it’s a humiliating compromise. The circuit layout has been revealed, and rather than the promised glorious four-mile run between the U.S. Supreme Court building, the Lincoln Memorial, and back along the National Mall, it’s a 1.66-mile tootle around in front of the Capitol with seven turns, three of which are 90 degrees, and only one of which is to the right.

The minuscule course should make it easier to pave over Washington’s world-famously decrepit street surfaces, but someone in Washington will have to actually do that in order for it to happen, and that seems like a big ask. As for the racing, well, I hope you like slow corners. They should be easier to handle than normal, though, because the longest straight is a quarter mile shorter than the typical IndyCar street course, so the cars will never be going terribly fast.

So what are the bureaucratic-nightmare reasons this circuit is so compromised and the race is deeply unlikely to happen at all? Well, they’re all things we knew immediately: Racing on the proposed course would require an act of Congress to override a ban on commercial advertising, which would take a million years and probably a whole lobbying team to accomplish, there are laws in place to protect historic buildings from loud sounds and vibrations that would be hard to get around (not that I’d expect the current administration to care overly much about destroying historic things), and, well, they just can’t shut down that much city and build that much barrier in time.

I am moving my Freedom 250 doomsday clock hands five minutes closer to midnight.

The worst thing about motorsports is that there’s no way to agree about whether something is good or not. There are too many interested parties with too many different motivations and preferences, and thus two people can watch the exact same thing and derive opposite opinions about it.

I tend to use a pretty simple heuristic: Was it interesting, yes or no? In fairness, I have almost never watched a race car in motion and not found it interesting, but there are, of course, levels to this. I would put the 2026 Formula 1 Australian Grand Prix near the highest end of the highest level.

Oh, one car is way faster than the others and won the race 1-2? How interesting! They must have done a very good job at working around the loopholes in this exceedingly complicated regulation set and built the best race car possible under the circumstances! I wonder what the championship fight between the two Mercedes drivers will be like, and if any of the three other teams with the same engine or Ferraris that embarrassed them off the line at the start might have something to say about it!

Oh, a bunch of cars had serious technical problems? How interesting! As a motor racing enthusiast, I wonder if there are 1,001 or so fascinating technical stories there!

Oh, Oscar Piastri destroyed his car on the recon lap to the grid by getting on the power with his right wheels over the curb? How interesting! I wonder if there will be more mistakes that add drama to the season this year!

Oh, there was a race at the front for the first like 15 laps instead of it being over by turn 3? How interesting! I wonder if the fluctuations in energy available for overtake boosts from lap to lap had anything to do with that!

Oh, Ferrari chose to stay out when most people chose to pit under an early virtual safety car, and for some reason they aren’t apologizing afterwards? How interesting! The fan narrative that “Ferrari is bad at race strategy” might not completely explain the decision-making at the team that beat everyone else except the team with the head-and-shoulders fastest car!

Oh, Fernando Alonso had the Aston Martin in the points for a period of time despite the car being a deathtrap shitbox, Cadillac finished its first Formula 1 race ever, and Gabi Bortoleto got Audi points on debut? How interesting!

Oh, Arvid Lindblad, the season’s only rookie, finished EIGHTH? How interesting!

Oh, Max Verstappen and Lando Norris, the dominant drivers of the 2022–2025 ground effect cars, hate the new cars, but Lewis Hamilton, the most successful Formula 1 driver of all time, loves them and thinks they’re “really fun”? How interesting!

Oh, HALF A MILLION PEOPLE went to a motor race this weekend? HOW INTERESTING!

Like, come on. Yes, there are some wrinkles to smooth out after race 1 of year 1 of a completely different car. No, nobody completely understands what the optimal way to use the battery is. Yes, it is possible that some changes to the ICE/electric balance of energy output might help. So, let us sally forth into the Formula 1 season and do those things. If you’re not entertained, I dare say that’s your choice.

Do you like the new cars? That’s a different matter. Personally, I do. I think powerful electric boost and active aero for efficiency is a very interesting combination. There are some things I’d like changed, but they’re all regulatory matters.

I don’t mind the howling turbo spooling long start procedure, but I think they should be allowed to use the instantaneous power delivery of the electric motor to get off the line. Rather than have them clobber each other at the start like Franco Colapinto nearly did to Liam Lawson, have them launch hard into lap 1 with very different energy levels and race it out.

Have a qualifying mode that turns up the ICE fuel flow level or something to make the split less than 50/50. Do I care whether that power goes to the wheels or the battery? No, I just want to make sure they’re making the car go as fast as possible in every part of the track when they don’t have to save tires or race people.

That’s about it, really. The cars are clearly better for racing than before, they look and sound incredible, and personally I am more interested in acceleration than top speed or overall lap time. I go into this season as excited as ever before because even if it’s status quo, it will be better, and it won’t be. There will be massive surprises.

A lot of NASCAR fans, commentators, and competitors say that the first intermediate oval is when “the season actually starts” because superspeedways are crapshoots and road courses aren’t real NASCAR for some reason, even though the first NASCAR road course race was in 1954, and there have been permanent road courses on the calendar since 1988. I find this attitude incredibly irritating and self-defeating, but fortunately most people don’t even know this attitude exists and watch Daytona, Atlanta, and COTA and love them, as I do.

Frankly, I thought the NASCAR races at Phoenix this weekend were a big step down into the normal midseason feeling that NASCAR is a grind. The races weren’t bad, and the outcomes were just, but there was nothing particularly distinguished, either. I know a lot of race fans find recovery drives through the pack to be inspiring racing — and Sheldon Creed, Shane van Gisbergen, and Sunday winner Ryan Blaney all provided excellent demonstrations of that — but to me that’s of a second tier to battles of evenly matched cars and drivers on challenging tracks. Don’t tell NASCAR this because they might not agree to do these anymore, but the big March weekend at Phoenix Raceway was comprehensively carried by IndyCar.

Knowing this was happening does not lessen the intensity of hearing the news that Max Verstappen, Jules Gounon, and Dani Juncadella will race a Red Bull-liveried, Winward Racing-prepared Mercedes-AMG GT3 at the Nürburgring 24 Hours. Max will also contest the NLS2 round in preparation.

Today just happens to be the day these lineups are coming out, but it does taste a little more delicious coming on the heels of the opening round of a Formula 1 rule set that Max viscerally hates. Don’t get me wrong, I’d like to see Max race in Formula 1 for a long time to come, but I also hope that sports car racing is increasingly where he has his fun in life.