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High Limit has set itself up for a big season this year, and if you’re new to dirt racing, I recommend you watch it.

First of all, it’s on FloRacing, which is (at least for now) the best value that exists in racing streaming services, just because there’s so much on there. The World of Outlaws series, which consider themselves the established leaders in dirt late model and sprint car racing, have their own exorbitantly priced streaming service, and Flo gives you all the same kinds of racing — with many of the same drivers — in different series, plus all kinds of other dirt, pavement, and even snow racing, for (at press time) half the price. So there’s that.

But in its own right, High Limit is just a very rewarding race series to follow. They run 64 races in a season, first of all, with many on weeknights, so if you’re someone who needs racing every night like I do, High Limit has got you. Many of the drivers are fantastic characters, and with Kyle Larson in charge on the business side, there are regular NASCAR tie-ins and crossovers.

This weekend, for instance, High Limit is in Las Vegas and scheduled around the NASCAR weekend. Not only is Larson running, two of NASCAR’s greatest villains — Corey Day and Ty Gibbs — are as well. But despite the constant presence of star power from established dirt racers and NASCAR interlopers, the series embodies its grassroots nature. There are always local aspirants and track legends in the mix, and in a discipline as instantaneous and physical as winged sprint car racing, the competition is always close.

Supercars just wrapped up its highest profile weekend of the year as the show-stealing support act at the Melbourne Grand Prix. It’s not necessary in this venue to sum up all four races and their qualifying sessions, but I will offer some takeaways.

The new Toyota is really almost there. The Walkinshaw Supras qualified near the front at times and bagged multiple top-10 results, including the Supra’s first podium from Ryan Wood.

The Penrite cars are well in it. Payne was a huge factor in the first two races, and Allen had to keep going to the back and driving back through. He surely passed the majority of the cars passed in the entire race meeting.

Brodie Kostecki won pole on Thursday and converted it into a win, breaking a six-year streak of Ford failing to win in Melbourne, and he did it with food poisoning. He only got more fearsome as he felt better, winning three of the four races and becoming the second driver ever to win the Larry Perkins Trophy twice.

Broc Feeney did win race 3, meaning Kostecki is only one win ahead of him on the year so far, and Will Brown finally poled one after flailing in qualifying for so long, but overall I come away from Melbourne concerned about Triple Eight’s form. Brown made a lot of bad moves in races and got decisively trounced by Brodie in the last one. Feeney ended up in a lap 1 wreck in the final race and for some reason kept his foot in, dragging his car around destroying everybody else around him before retiring. I sense frustration in the team.

I am certainly not concerned about the form of Supercars as a whole. They smashed long-standing attendance records on days when Formula 1 wasn’t even happening, and the overall weekend attendance was record-breaking also. I think Supercars is getting its moment of recognition on the global motorsports stage. SVG winning a bunch of NASCAR races probably helped, but the exciting Finals last year seemed to make an impact all on its own, and the series is taking advantage of the momentum.

IndyCar delivered under real pressure this weekend. Not only was it sharing the Phoenix weekend with NASCAR — and thus facing a chance to be 40 MPH faster than the racing many more people than usual were tuning in for — the opener at St. Pete had been kind of a snooze, at least in summary. Yes, it had the usual great IndyCar racing throughout the pack, but Álex Palou dancing away with another championship is not a storyline likely to deliver a critical growth year.

Fortunately for the storyline, Phoenix turned it on its head. Palou wrecked out of contention early in the race, and with Josef Newgarden surging back to his traditional position at the front of any short oval race, there is now a championship leader other than Palou for the first time since the 2024 season. Palou’s incident coming up on Rinus Veekay may have been a bit of a spotter fail, and another potential spotter fail of the same nature took Will Power and Christian Rasmussen out of contention later on. All day, Rasmussen continued to earn his reputation as the craziest man in IndyCar short oval racing, and it would have been quite a romp for him if he’d been able to hang on and win.

More shoutouts are necessary. Shoutout to Mick Schumacher for qualifying FOURTH in his first oval race ever. He didn’t have a glorious finish, but he sure had a glorious start. Shoutout to Dennis Hauger for one of the best saves I’ve ever seen (seen below). And — Will Power fan that I am — I must reserve my final shoutout for David Malukas for taking the 12 car to pole. That guy really has to prove he deserves the equipment upgrade he got, and this is some pretty good proof.

I found Formula 2 more charming this weekend in Melbourne than I have in the past because now their simple DRS-based racing reminds me of the Old Days of 2022–2025 Formula 1. More importantly, though, they put up some pretty good racing this weekend. Congratulations in particular to F2 rookie Nikola Tsolov from Campos Racing for a canny win in the feature race, taking advantage of some quick opportunities and dealing with Nico Varrone, hardly your typical F2 rookie in terms of racing experience.

I am, of course, mainly watching Formula 2 this year to see Colton Herta, and though he crashed in practice and did not amaze in qualifying or in race results, I think he did fine. In the sprint race he was aggressive and opportunistic, testing and learning the limits of the car and making some mistakes without causing any meaningful problems. In the feature, he drove more conservatively and made good choices, finishing in P7. Herta was, it should be noted, handily beaten by his Hitech teammate, Ritomo Miyata, who is the most interesting matchup with Herta on the grid in terms of prior open-wheel success.

The tenth season of Formula 2 is off to a good start. The broadcast mentioned that Lando Norris is the first F2 graduate to become F1 world champion, which blows my mind.

No decision has yet been made, but if the F1 races in Bahrain and Saudi Arabia in April have to be canceled due to war, there is no logistical option for replacing them this year. The 2026 championship would be down to 22 races, and there would be a month-long hole in it between Japan and Miami.

When this Darryl H. Cuttell fellow purchased the IHRA, a bunch of other series (including boat racing), race tracks, and other assets, the communications from the new organization were so delusional about its prospects that I sensed we were in for a good old-fashioned rich guy motorsports meltdown. I’m just glad none of these deals touched any race series I care about.

Nothing has overtly gone belly up yet, but I certainly haven’t heard anything about the racing; in fact, this story here is the first thing I’ve heard about how it’s going. Answer: terribly. The guy appears to manage like a tyrant, and he’s quickly running out of people to run this thing for him.

With the Qatar 1812km postponed due to the breakout of regional war, the FIA World Endurance Championship chose to open the season in Imola and try to reschedule the Qatar round. In the ensuing flurry of activity, it was unclear whether teams would get their Prologue testing event this year, as it typically precedes the race weekend in Qatar. Fortunately, they’ve figured out a way to do a mini-prologue in Imola on April 14.

The only team planning to run the CUPRA Leon in the British Touring Car Championship this year has had to pull out due to lack of funds. Un-Limited Motorsport raced in BTCC in 2024 and 2025. The CUPRA will be absent from the BTCC grid for the first time since the car was introduced in 2021.

I will have a three-week-old baby, so my chances of making it to the first Atlanta Motoring Festival & Concours are pretty slim, but I hope this is something my whole family is going to in a year or two. I request that all Atlanta-area readers go and report back.

Those of us rightly concerned with the future of Prema IndyCar — which has now missed a race — have not heard much from financier Deborah Mayer since all that started to melt down due to lack of funding. In other categories, we did know that the Iron Dames program, which Mayer founded, would not be racing much if at all this year, but she has now at least attempted to do some press about it.

Iron Dames is reorienting itself as a more open-ended support system for getting more women into motorsports, rather than a race team with cars for women to drive, and some may see this as a defeat, but I think it’s a good call. That program was too rigid to get solid, lasting results. It was a box into which everything had to fit, rather than an adaptable team that could draw together the right drivers, the right car, and the right program. The drivers were top-notch; that wasn’t the problem. The problem is that the best women in racing should be seeking the best seats in racing, and the movement supporting them should be helping them do that rather than spending all its resources trying to go racing all by itself.

I have been waiting to cover this story until we were sure there was nothing seriously wrong with Alex Bowman’s health, but despite seemingly widespread efforts to make this into just one of them racin’ deals, I still don’t actually feel sure about that. After getting out of the car and being replaced by a pit reporter at COTA last week, Alex Bowman will now miss the Phoenix Cup race with Anthony Alfredo substituting. Bowman’s form has not been where you’d expect a Hendrick driver to be for a long time, and now I’m starting to worry that it’s systemic.

Ahead of this weekend’s opening round, the FIA has updated the guidelines for Formula 1 driving standards and penalties. In the last couple years, stewards’ decisions have provided way too many distractions from the racing, and imprecise, contradictory, or overly prescriptive guidelines have led a lot of F1 drivers to questionable on-track decisions. Something does need to change about this, and it seems like they’re going less prescriptive and more principles-based, which is good. The real problem, though, is that stewards are part-time volunteers, they change often, and few of them have enough racing experience to make knowledgeable rulings. How this sport has not yet figured out how to pay for professional stewards is beyond me.

I have not seen anything that worries me yet after the first two Formula 1 free practice sessions of 2026. Adelaide is (along with Qatar) probably the hardest track of the year for energy management as a pretty flat-out place, and we saw earlier this week how the FIA’s track-by-track energy deployment rules are going to work. This is the key element that will make or break the 50/50 split between turbo V6 and hybrid power: Is there enough headroom in the package to fine-tune things for the demands of each race weekend in the rules?

In Melbourne, it looks like teams are settling on a big super-clip (full blast of battery recharge with full throttle while slowing) into turn 9 as the bit of track they have to sacrifice in order to accelerate with full power on the next straight and make it to the other side. It’s the sort of thing purists were worried about, and I’ve seen some complain about how it looks through practice, but as Juan Pablo Montoya reported trackside on the broadcast, the acceleration after that is mighty impressive. I’ll withhold an opinion on whether that’s worth it and say we’ll find out in qualifying.

In general, every team and every driver looks to be where I’d expect them to be at this point with the exception of Aston Martin, which we knew was in trouble before the circus got to Australia, but things seem to really be crumbling now. A blame game has started (Newey is pinning it all on Honda, of course), the engine is shaking the hybrid system to bits, the drivers’ health is at risk from the vibrations, and it looks likely they may retire by choice before much of the race is even complete.

It’s not all Honda’s fault, of course; Aston sounds like they were taken by surprise by the total brain-drain of Honda people who worked on the Red Bull program, even though this is how Honda has always worked. Arguably it’s why Honda’s F1 history is so messy, too, and it’s repeating itself here, and Aston Martin was not ready for it.

Honda sends people to F1 to train and bring that wisdom to other parts of the company. This is also Toyota’s approach to Formula 1, but that’s why their arrangement with Haas is so carefully constrained, and it doesn’t even include the power unit, which is provided to Haas by Ferrari. Haas, meanwhile, is putting in top 10 times in practice. Aston Martin is hardly putting up any times at all, and Lance Stroll’s fastest one so far is on trend to be outside the 107% window to qualify!

The other Ferrari customer team, Cadillac, is having more problems as we get into the real race weekend, and that should surprise no one. I was surprised things were going so well before. But nothing has happened that suggests any sort of doom. I sure would love to see both cars finish the race, though. “We’re not last” is as ambitious a first race as I could ever demand of them.

Ferrari itself is looking great, as expected after testing. Lewis is happy and actively exploring the car and the energy deployment system, and Charles was fastest of all in FP1. Both drivers’ lap times on every team are close — except on cars with issues, like that of Lando Norris — and that’s not surprising; they’re still heavily in testing mode. Mercedes seems to have turned up the wick for FP2, which put at least Piastri’s McLaren into the mix. Verstappen went off and made a bit of a mess of his car, but by and large the Red Bull power unit is humming along. Arvid Lindblad put up a P5 time in his first FP1 session as a Formula 1 driver.

Again, we’ll see how qualifying looks. I have seen enough to believe these cars can race, but qualifying is where energy starvation will make the difference between a field that makes sense and one that does not. Now, that might be fun. But it might be a mess.

You could argue that this is just Ford reaching a captive audience, since U.S. F1 fans are the obvious target, but I think it’s a pretty interesting signal that Ford Racing is spending gonzo money on narrative-rich ads about their racing programs that won’t be broadcast on television. They must think this Apple TV thing is going to work for Formula 1. And they’re using the opportunity to educate U.S. F1 fans about racing beyond F1, so I’m all in favor.

McLaren is not a central fandom of mine, but I do like how they roll. Who knows how profitable any of this is, but they seem like the company that takes motor racing the most seriously in the sense that it’s the reason they exist, and if anything their road cars are derived from their race cars rather than the other way around. They’re also some of the best performing and driver-focused road cars in the world, so they’re pulling it off.

This year, we’ll see their LMDh hypercar on track ahead of its racing debut next year, and McLaren execs are doing some press about how they’re justifying this effort. They’re calling it Project Endurance. They’re going to make and sell track-only consumer versions and host driving events with them, that sort of thing. Obviously this is for the mega-elite — McLaren’s GT cars were already very high-end, and this is going up-market — but maybe it’s also the kind of thing that convinces the mega-elite to stay invested in motorsports.

Manthey is the king of LMGT3, reigning champions in DTM, they’re in IMSA now, you know them, you love them. They’re the ones who invented the color “grello.” They are synonymous with Porsche 911 racing. They have revealed this year’s WEC cars today, and, well, the grello-adjacent one (Lore editor’s note: not official Grello™) is butt ugly. But the other one is very cool! Interesting conundrum.

Round 2 is a company big-time collectors seem to like, though I’m not familiar with their work. Lionel’s work I am all too familiar with; they’re the ones who cancel production of all the diecasts of Black drivers’ cars after I order them. I go way out of my way to order my NASCAR diecasts from third parties or direct from teams because that is how bad The Official Diecast Brand of NASCAR™ is to deal with.

How did an industry that made the most famous race car drivers on Earth 25 years ago fall so hard? Well, I’m sure there is some macroeconomic explanation, but hopefully this consolidation indicates a new path forward for racing collectibles that actually takes advantage of the last 25 years of logistical advances, which have been, you know, considerable.

Prodigious racing collector Cale says:

Round 2 owns the Racing Champions brand, too, so if there is any justice in the world…

— Cale Putnam (@caleputnam.bsky.social) Mar 5, 2026 at 10:06 AM

Reigning Toyota GR Cup North America champion, front-running Whelen Mazda MX-5 Cup driver, current four-for-four IMSA VP Racing SportsCar Challenge GSX championship leader, and friend-of-friends-of-the-site, Westin Workman, will add the GT4 America championship to his docket this year. He will drive the No. 68 Toyota GR Supra GT4 EVO2 for RAFA Racing alongside Tyler Gonzalez in the Silver class. This is an amazing roster for an amazing multi-car team.

What I want to know about Westin’s path is, is he going to Connor Zilisch his way into NASCAR, or is he going to drive Toyota hypercars in the WEC?

Ford has hired its race engineers for the two as-yet-unnamed (but surely named Mustang GTP) Hypercars it will enter in the 2027 FIA World Endurance Championship. One is Leena Gade, who won the 24 Hours of Le Mans with Audi three times. The other is Jean-Philippe Sarrazin, who engineered the #6 Penske Porsche when it won the world drivers’ championship in 2024. Not bad, eh?

Their boss (trackside engineering manager) will be Grant Clarke, who was chief engineer of the NEOM McLaren Formula E team in 2024 and at TF Sport in WEC for four years before that.

Look. I said before Daytona that I was glad Cleetus was running the truck race there because I was ready to rip the bandaid off the question of whether influencers who drive little beaters around tracks they made themselves can jump straight into NASCAR. He had run ARCA, and his results had been uninteresting, but fine. Put him in a truck and see how he does, so we can get this over with. Well, we did. He was completely overwhelmed and wrecked almost immediately. So, that settles it, I thought. The dude does not know how to race at a high level yet.

Oh, no. It’s not over. On the contrary, Richard Childress is now putting him in the No. 33 O’Reilly car to race at Rockingham, having signed him to a two-year part-time deal. Notice how the press release calls him a “skilled driver and motorsports enthusiast” but a “genius marketer.” They aren’t even hiding why they’re doing this.