Supercars has expanded its New Zealand swing into a doubleheader this year with its first visit to the South Island at Ruapuna, near Christchurch. Apparently, this track is officially named Euromarque Motorsport Park, but I watched practically the entire weekend’s broadcast and did not hear that name mentioned even a single time.

This event had to ingest a fourth race from the preceding round at Taupō, where the Sunday race was canceled due to looming cyclone. Combined with a technical track that these cars (and most of the drivers) had never raced at before and majorly dusty conditions, it made for an epic but grueling event.

Perhaps it’s unsurprising, then, that the team that dominated Ruapuna was Penrite Racing, winners of last year’s Biblical Bathurst 1000. Matt Payne won the last two races with Kiwi pride, and Kai Allen won the first. Brodie Kostecki won the second, so he remains a force to be reckoned with. Tragically, Ryan Wood was moments away from winning the JR Trophy as a symbolic triumph for New Zealand motorsports when his car gave up the ghost, handing it to Broc Feeney, who was consistent every race in New Zealand despite not winning any of them. Even he said he was “gutted” for Woody, though, as the trophy slipped from the young Kiwi hero’s grasp through no fault of his own.

Also of note right at the end was a fairly insane move Chaz Mostert made on Brodie Kostecki that sent him spiraling off into the dust. The defending champion was duly penalized.

Christchurch seems like an amazing city for a race meeting, and the people showed up in force. All the Supercars people reported having a great time around town. Ruapuna made a great addition to the calendar, and it made the New Zealand leg of the Supercars tour even stronger.

There is no question in anyone’s mind that Lyn St. James is a hall-of-fame race car driver. What bums me out just a little bit is that she still sounds so surprised to be inducted. She felt like an outsider her whole career, and it sounds like that feeling never went away.

Last time I saw her, she was getting ferried around Road Atlanta on a golf cart like the Queen of IMSA — because she basically is — but she still doesn’t sound like she can believe she’s part of the club. I hope no future generation of women in racing grows up feeling like that, and if they don’t, it’s thanks in huge part to Lyn St. James.

At last, Mercedes has stopped teasing Doriane and all of us and let the 2025 F1 Academy champion drive a Formula 1 car. What a dream: She got to drive a Lewis Hamilton car at Silverstone. It was the W12 from 2021, a Mercedes to be remembered forever for controversial reasons, but being slow was not one of them. They did win the Constructors’ Championship that year, remember.

Pin was supported at track by both Kimi Antonelli and George Russell. It sounds like the whole team is supports her all the time, really. If you haven’t seen or heard her recent episode of F1 Beyond the Grid, make sure to do so. She’s got all the makings of someone who is going to make it.

When IMSA Long Beach sucks, it really sucks, so I was relieved to see a quick and relatively clean race. Acura didn’t have the cleanest start to the weekend; Colin Braun walled the 60 in second practice, requiring a chassis change, but the 93 poled it and was able to convert for the ARX-06’s first win at Long Beach, which is a big deal considering Acura is the race’s title sponsor. Well-sourced rumors that the IMSA program will be canceled for next year put a cloud over it, though.

In GTD, the #12 Vasser Sullivan Lexus got the team its first win in two years, a remarkable result for such an aged GT3 car. While its GR GT replacement will surely be a monster, I am equally sure we’ll see customers racing the RC F GT3 for years to come.

I feel so bad for Dennis Hauger. He was a total monster in IndyNXT, and then he comes up to the big leagues, and it turns out his super-genius veteran race engineer, Michael Cannon, is “unavailable” for Long Beach for undisclosed reasons. How Cannon even ended up at Dale Coyne Racing after all he’s seen and done is a matter people in the paddock speak about in hushed tones. He is not the most reliable person in the paddock, let’s put it that way. No idea whether that’s what’s at play here, but the pattern is uncomfortable to observe.

Here’s a real silly season doozie: Porsche is rumored to have struck a loan deal to let Kévin Estre drive for Toyota in the FIA World Endurance Championship in 2027. A guy like Estre doesn’t sign a factory Hypercar deal only for his team to pull out of WEC, so it seems only right. He does not deny the rumor, but he does affirm that he will still drive for Porsche next year, meaning in IMSA.

This connects with a rumor that Mike Conway will leave Toyota to join the Ford Hypercar program, so Estre would be filling that seat. There’s a lot bubbling under the surface for Toyota drivers, with growing influence over Haas F1, a new GT3 car coming soon, lots of pieces to move around.

Colton Herta doesn’t just have to race in Formula 2 and pay his dues if he wants to be Cadillac F1’s great American hope — he also has to fulfill his duties as test driver and run some laps in the MAC-26. The team has scheduled him for all four of their young driver FP1 slots. The first one will be in Barcelona, and the other three tracks will be determined depending on the race team’s needs.

The CEO situation at Supercars is causing deserved consternation, so it was a savvy move for interim CEO Barclay Nettlefold to walk in with some good news in his back pocket. A nice parkland street race long in the making in the city of Perth will become the new Supercars opening round in the 2028 season.

One of the greatest storylines in Formula 1 right now is the fate of Red Bull Racing, which honestly looked like it was about to rocket back to the top mid-year last year after firing Christian Horner, only to fall flat on its ass with the new car. Laurent Mekies got a lot of benefit of the doubt last year when his call-up coincided with Max Verstappen’s championship resurgence, but now he has to make some serious moves. The mass exodus of talent, mostly to McLaren, continues apace, so Mekies has to find the right people to promote from within to get the next generation started.

The big moves during the surprise war-induced spring break are the promotion of Ben Waterhouse to chief performance and design engineer (formerly head of performance engineering, God, F1 job titles are dumb) and the relocation of Andrea Landi, formerly deputy technical director at Racing Bulls, to the A team as head of performance.

Surely, everyone at Racing Bulls understands that providing talent to Red Bull Racing is the entire point of their organization, and no one will be mad at Laurent Mekies for poaching their guy as he himself was poached only a year ago. What’s interesting about this poaching — I mean, uh, promotion — is that Landi was the guy in charge of car development at Racing Bulls.

Remember, the car story last year was that the Red Bull was a nightmare as always — in the way Max likes — and the VCARB was one of the most benign cars on the grid, enabling the team to snatch podiums and stuff, giving Isack Hadjar the results he needed to get moved up to Red Bull after just one year. Perhaps it is time for Red Bull to make race cars that are nice to drive, especially now that GP and possibly even Max are leaving.

Energy drinks are the new tobacco when it comes to racing sponsorship, and Rockstar has made the savvy move of picking Tyler Reddick and 23XI for its return to NASCAR racing. The Red Bull cars are struggling, and one of the Monster cars just won its first race (the other one never will), so why not jump right in with the guy who’s putting up record numbers?

I have wondered since it was announced what an Official Pasta of Formula 1® was. Is it served in the Paddock Club™? Maybe. I’ll never know. But even if you aren’t a global elite, you can still eat the Fastest Pasta on Earth. You can get it at Walmart, in fact. It’s called “Racing Wheels,” and it’s shaped like something sort of resembling a wheel-like object. Will I feed this to my children? I guess, probably? But I can’t right now because it’s sold out.

It’s weird that IndyCar is still staffing up its competition side in the middle of the season, but at least the hires appear well qualified. The new vice president of competition and race engineering at IndyCar is Mike O’Gara, an Indiana native who has been an executive at Chip Ganassi Racing for 12 years. He established Ganassi’s Cadillac IMSA program, in addition to helping make Ganassi as unassailable as it currently is in IndyCar. Seems like the right guy to be in charge of, among other things, rolling out the new race car.

The many headlines generated this year by dire safety incidents on the Mount Panorama Circuit seem to have gotten through to the Bathurst Regional Council. They have approved meaningful funding for improvements to barriers, debris fencing, access roads, and fiber-optic cables for communication. They’ve also applied to the federal government for funding for resurfacing and other big-time facility improvements.

Aston Martin factory driver Mattia Drudi just got the call he’s probably been dreaming of — or at least the call prior to that call. He has been tapped as reserve driver for both the WEC and IMSA Valkyrie programs.

Drudi drives the Vantage GT3 in both WEC and GTWC Europe, but his outing in the Valkyrie in last year’s WEC Bahrain rookie test apparently went well, and now he’s going to be the guy waiting by the Batphone.

United Autosports is not a small race team. It is exceedingly well financed, effectively run, and successful. But the step up in complexity and precision called for to operate the upcoming McLaren LMDh is such that United had to abandon its plans to upgrade its current 60,000-square-foot facility and find a new one. That’s what it takes to run at the front of the World Endurance Championship these days.

A 10-year-old company called Revolution Race Cars just unveiled a fairly unique and rather quick-looking track-only car it calls the HyperSport. It’s light, fairly powerful for the weight, has lots of prototype-ish aero surfaces and an IndyCar-style aero screen, but it comes in at a GT-ish price. It looks like a fun choice for track days, but they’re also planning to enter various European and North American prototype racing series as a class in 2027.

The European Le Mans Series 4 Hours of Barcelona was won by the Forestier Racing by Panis #29 ORECA, driven by Esteban Masson, Oliver Gray, and Louis Rousset. They bounced back from penalties and snatched the lead with under 10 minutes to go. Fantastic race.

As usual in the ELMS, there are a lot of well known young hopefuls trying to stand out, and a few of them did. Doriane Pin — much to her fans’ delight — returned to sports cars, and she, Richard Verschoor, and Giorgio Roda ran up front all race long and landed on the LMP2 ProAm class podium for Duqueine Team. Jamie Chadwick, still stuck in ELMS while her coworkers go on to warm up her Genesis Hypercar seat for her, finished fourth outright for IDEC Sport with Laurents Hörr and Valerio Rinicella.

The big bummer of the race, I’m sorry to say, was the fate of Jack Doohan. This was his first race since all that messy Super Formula stuff fell through, and when he got in, he brought the car into the top five and briefly led the race. The fight was on for second place all the way to the end, but after light contact making the pass for P2, something went wrong with the right rear with one minute to go, and Jack limped across the line in sixth. The team got a 10-second penalty post-race for speeding under full-course yellow, demoting them to P7.

Chin up, Jack. There’s more racing to go.

At last, the awkwardness of Chevrolet-badged stock cars the world over being named after a car that has ceased to exist will be properly resolved. There will be a 2028 Camaro, it will resume more or less the same place in the GM platform, and the body style is quite cool.

IndyCar qualifying on ovals is some of the most exciting motorsports on Earth. Qualifying, I’m saying. The racing is, too, but there is such incredible tension in watching one car cannonball all the way around an oval and watching the speed delta tick green and red. Is he gonna make it??? It’s absolute cinema.

This format does work on road and street courses, too, in certain series and situations. Supercars does it for some events, and the highlights belong up there with the race finishes. IndyCar suspects it might have some more cinema available by doing single-car, single-lap qualifying for the Fast 6 on street courses, and I’m glad they’re going to take the rest of the year’s street races to dial it in. But if it’s going to work, my god, someone at Fox has to figure out how to get a freaking sector time onto the screen.

Not to be outdone by his teammate, Julien Andlauer, currently underemployed Porsche factory driver Kévin Estre will be hustling an LMP2 in the Pro/Am class at the 24 Hours of Le Mans. Estre is joining TDS Racing in the #14 with Mathias Beche and Tobias Lütke. It will be epic to see Estre and Andlauer race each other in cars they could drive with their eyes closed.