I think it’s probably fair to say that Aston Martin F1’s 2026 car is the most anticipated race car of the year, what with the Adrian Newey and the Honda works status of it all. Hyping it up even more, the first test is in Spain, and Fernando Alonso drives that car. So with the eyes of the world on this car, Lance Stroll pulls it out onto a hot track for the first time, drives it around slowly four times, and then on the fifth lap has to pull it over in the runoff and shut it down.

UPDATE FEB 20: More nightmare stories added from later in testing.

This Netflix thing seems to be working pretty well for motor racing. Keep it up, I say.

They’re still racing IROC cars, and all the old greats who can still race are doing so. Jeff Gordon, Mark Martin, Bobby Labonte, so on and so forth. This news just reminds me that NASCAR lost its antitrust suit, and its fear and loathing about racing it doesn’t own made it look particularly bad, even though everybody knows that NASCAR could just be a happy partner with stuff like this and derive nothing but benefit. Maybe it will now.

Can I say something without anybody getting mad?

I found out about Thunder Road Speedbowl in Vermont on FloRacing, and I’m really glad that broadcast is working out for both parties. Great racing, great facility, great announcers, great categories — it’s the total package.

A few days ago, an X account that I guess seems like some kind of official Trump administration communications channel (?) posted an absurdly intellectual-property-stealing AI video about a fictional Washington D.C. IndyCar street race called the “D.C. Grand Prix,” apparently trying to meme the race into being in this very upcoming season. In Washington, D.C. In late August.

Now, clearly, this is right up there with the worst-conceived motorsports events of all time, and the ways for IndyCar to wriggle out of it are myriad. Graham Rahal might think it’s a good idea for all the ✌️ “exposure” ✌️ and whatnot, but, listen, Graham. As someone familiar with putting on insane events in inhospitable environments in late August — aside from literally everything else about this — I assure you this is going to make IndyCar look like a bunch of idiots.

But does it even have a snowball’s chance in hell of actually happening? Coming back from IndyCar media day, it sounds like James Hinchcliffe and Alex Rossi are a little worried it might.

UPDATE 1/30, 12:10 PM: The President has signed an executive order decreeing that this IndyCar race shall happen. Fascinating to consider what, if anything, this changes about the odds of it happening.

Former IndyCar driver Simona de Silvestro has qualified for the 2026 Winter Olympics, representing Italy in bobsleigh. It warms my heart to see a professional fast person make it to the top level of going fast, even if the shark-infested waters of motorsport aren’t where it happens for them.

Slade Stewart, whose children designed the pink, glittery unicorn livery the world knows as Sparklefarts, has moved over to run GT World Challenge America full-time with Riley Motorsports. Andy Lee is co-driver. The car will be a BMW M4 GT3 Evo, which still really suits Sparklefarts, though it’s quite a different vibe from the Lamborghini Super Trofeo car.

No huge shock here. McLaren’s automotive strategy is stagnant on the front end and up-in-the-air on the back end, so there’s no sense marketing cars at that level until that shakes out. The one-make Trophy series is a more integrated business, GT3 is ramping back up a little bit as McLaren prepares to go hypercar racing, they can’t afford to be spread that thin. They shut down their entire Formula E team, too.

I just don’t believe Mohammed Ben Sulayem is smart enough to successfully conceal any hint of paperwork malfeasance or whatever other wrongs he might have done. Either he actually hasn’t done anything wrong in his management of the FIA, or one of these proliferating investigations is going to take him out, as his recent election opponent, Tim Mayer, believes will happen.

We have received the James Vowles follow-up I requested on the problems that led to Williams missing the first extensive testing session of 2026 F1 cars. He obfuscated and dissimulated when asked if the rumors were true about the car failing crash tests or being overweight, but he does consider whatever happened to be a hiccup that will not prevent Williams from making it to the main pre-season test in Bahrain

The one concrete takeaway I have is that the ultimate problem was running out of parts, and that it would have been too disruptive to operations to drop everything, fix the problems, and make the Barcelona test. I am willing to accept that this sounds like the team knows what needs to happen and is just having trouble at the last mile of making it happen, and I will not be surprised if everything is fine by Bahrain.

Christian Horner is no longer being the least bit subtle about plotting his comeback to Formula 1. The team he’s looking to buy into is Alpine, of course. Who else could it be? It’s a match made in Flavio and Christian’s version of Heaven, which I do not recommend visualizing. And lest you think that’s all talk, he’s meeting with MBS about it, and he’s even planning a whole comeback tour in Australia to talk about… himself, I guess? So, yeah, I guess it’s all talk. But he’s buying a lot of plane tickets.

I’m gonna be honest here: I am more or less glad about this. The fundamental belief that fuels my love of motor racing is that it is a karma-laundering pursuit. It is made out of the machinery of human waste and destruction, but it sublimates it into transcendent activity.

I am sure that if I really sat down and concentrated, I could figure out exactly what these new science-y and tech-y things IMSA is doing — including a new program called IMSA Labs — are for, but I’m not quite interested enough, if I’m being honest. All I need to know is, it seems good for motorsports that it’s moving up the tech tree from grease monkeys in garages because that makes it worth continuing to invest in.

The Lola Cars Formula E team has decided it doesn’t need help anymore and will run the team itself. That seems like a show of optimism, both for Formula E itself and for the project of bringing back Lola as a racing car brand, and who doesn’t love that?

One week after Phil Hanson was named a full factory Ferrari driver and days after Ye Yifei’s debut at the Daytona 24, Robert Kubica has been confirmed for the Le Mans-winning crew as they attempt to go back-to-back. Last year’s win was a wonderful story, both because Kubica’s comeback from injury is a miracle and because the #83 is the nominally privateer Ferrari 499P that beat the two red ones. Ferrari still did everything in its power to make sure the yellow one could win, of course, but clearly it’s a more fun entry.

Speaking of fun, Ye Yifei was definitely having it in Daytona. We spoke to him the day before the race:

It was super weird seeing Nick Tandy in a green race suit surrounded by bubbles and dancing dinosaurs in Daytona, but what was not weird was seeing Laurin Heinrich in black and red. He was so obviously ready for this.

Peter Falk was a central engineer and director at Porsche for its most glorious decades. He started in 1959 as one of only 10 employees in vehicle testing, and he went on to be there for Porsche’s groundbreaking entries and glorious victories across categories until 1993.

I’ll have much more to say about the 2026 Daytona 24 as Luke and I pull our materials together, but I do want to shout out this article in the meantime for giving BMW M Team WRT its flowers. I talked to nobody who expected anything out of this team’s first year in IMSA, but before the race I was quietly hoping to see something, and we absolutely did. I’m looking forward to seeing how BMW does running both championships.

It was a little awkward to talk about, but Red Bull — dominant force in more than one F! regulatory era as an engine customer — was at risk of catastrophic setback if its incredibly bold plan of becoming a works team (with Ford’s help) did not go smoothly. Well, it looks like it did.

Red Bull — which has to field four cars, remember — ran like a clock in the Barcelona test, and Isack Hadjar did the fastest lap of the first day. He did later wreck the car, and the team may have lost some running from that, but I don’t think there’s any need to catastrophize. Verstappen also red-flagged a session in testing by getting into the gravel. This suggests Red Bull had everything it needed to know about basic reliability and were willing to start pushing hard.