Hendrick Motorsports #48 driver Alex Bowman continues to experience persistent vertigo that started to affect him in the third race of the season at Circuit of the Americas. He had to be relieved mid-race, and then he missed the next two races, replaced by Anthony Alfredo in Phoenix and Justin Allgaier in Las Vegas. Allgaier will continue driving the #48 at Darlington, Martinsville, and Bristol.

Bowman’s condition has still not been publicly attributed to any particular cause.

Last weekend’s Safari Rally Kenya, round three of the FIA World Rally Championship, was an incredible display of motoring in a way that was borderline painful to watch.

From a results perspective, it was gripping, with the lead swinging back and forth from stage to stage, eventually ending up in the hands of Takamoto Katsuta, his long-awaited first win in WRC. Everybody liked that (even though it was still a Toyota ass-whooping).

But the course was a real mess. Many tires were destroyed, many corners were destroyed by destroyed tires, whole suspensions were destroyed, whole teams had all their engines overheat because of intakes clogged with mud… and that was on the stages that weren’t canceled for being too treacherous!

Don’t get me wrong, it was a great watch, but I would not be pleased if I were a WRC team’s comptroller.

There are high-level discussions going on about the future of the event; they weren’t triggered by the craziness of this year’s rally, but that couldn’t be helping. This will be the last year the event has direct government involvement, and organizers and the series are trying to hash out what its future will look like. I hope they come up with something.

I was deeply bummed not to have NLS1 to watch this weekend, but there was plenty of good news about the series to dull the pain. That epic Mercedes DTM car rebuild I covered a couple weeks ago is being driven in the N24 by none other than Renger van der Zande. And even cooler: Anybody remember last April Fools’ Day when BMW dressed up an M3 Touring wagon like a race car? Well guess what — they’re racing it at the Nürburgring 24.

With the new, more accessible car regulations coming next year, 2027 promises to be a big moment for the FIA World Rally Championship, and the series is backing that up by pushing for some exciting new events. Rally is huge in Scotland, and it’s one of the most gorgeous places for it on Earth, so a full-blown world championship event sounds like a great idea.

Despite some sort of team error causing the Joe Gibbs Racing cars to repeatedly speed on pit lane and get sent to the back, Denny Hamlin charged back through the field to win his first race of the season in Las Vegas. This win put him ahead of Kevin Harvick on the all-time list, and his family was there to celebrate with him after the extremely difficult year they had last year both on and off the track.

Another storyline emerged in Vegas to watch this year: Tensions between former teammates Ross Chastain and Daniel Suárez have boiled over into a face-to-face confrontation. Their on-track encounters were not terribly severe, so whatever came up clearly goes back in their history.

It was quite sad for me to miss this year’s Road Atlanta Trans Am weekend — especially with our man Ray working in the pits for Nitro Motorsports — given how good of a time I had last year. I have been in love with the CUBE 3 Architecture TA2 Series ever since. It’s pretty chaotic — there are a lot of cars, they’re very powerful, and the drivers are generally quite young — but its standout talents tend to go on to do great things (the name Connor Zilisch may ring a bell).

Well TA2 has a new name to put on your bell-ringing list: Helio Meza. He’s won the first three races this year, and he won from pole at Road Atlanta leading every lap. Watch him whenever you can. His team also has him racing in the NASCAR Mexico Series this year.

The war in the Middle East has wreaked havoc on the motorsport world from day one, and now it has come for Formula 1. The April rounds in Bahrain and Saudi Arabia have been canceled, and it’s far too late to replace them. Industry sources estimate the overall financial hit to the industry to be north of $100 million.

I have said my piece on the overall significance of this war as pertains to motorsports, so let’s just concentrate on the specifics of each development. There is a possibility that this unexpected break early in the season could ultimately benefit the season. The new regulations and the cars they have produced — objectively awesome though they are — need a lot of work, and this will buy everyone time. The financial hits from lost race revenue are considerable, but they aren’t game-changing, and some of the savings teams will get running two fewer races might well be.

It’s just such a tragedy that this planet is so frequently prevented from being peaceful.

After its postponement on March 3 due to war in the region, the typically season-opening Qatar 1812km has been rescheduled as the penultimate round of the FIA World Endurance Championship and will be held October 22–24. The Prologue testing event prior to that race has been moved to Imola on April 14, three days before the six-hour race there that will now be the season opener.

My favorite Porsche 963 livery is back! Well, mostly back. I can’t lie, I far preferred the styling when Mustang Sampling sponsored the Proton Competition Porsche in the 2024 IMSA season, but this will do. We’re about to see it roll out for the 12 Hours of Sebring next weekend.

What makes up for it is that Mustang Sampling is back with JDC-Miller MotorSports, who ran the Mustang Sampling Cadillac DPi-V.R that won the 12 Hours of Sebring in 2021. This will be the livery for the rest of the season (bye bye, banana boat), and they have switched the number from 85 to 5, the classic Mustang Sampling IMSA number.

Whispers of a Days of Thunder sequel have burbled for years, but reporters are finding concrete signs that it’s actually underway now and that writer Will Staples is involved. Given how the F1 movie did, this definitely feels worth taking a swing at.

I know people will refuse to believe this, but I covered Apple as a journalist for five years, then bought stock and continued covering Apple as a biased investor for a decade, and one thing I can promise you is that Apple does not lie about hard data to the media. If they had gotten twice as many viewers as ESPN did a year ago, they would have said that, so it’s perfectly sensible to interpret “more” to mean “at least one more” in this case. But the other thing they said is that the performance exceeded “both F1 and Apple expectations,” so it’s time to accept that this U.S. broadcast deal is working.

Lots of people rushed to predict that moving onto a streaming service would tank Formula 1’s ratings in the U.S., but I don’t think those people quite appreciate how many people there already are in Apple’s ecosystem — and how good of new Formula 1 fans those people make. I expect the move to Apple TV to dramatically accelerate Formula 1’s popularity here, and I expect people who have gripes about it to get over it.

I’m sure Penske haters are having a very difficult time right now between the IndyCar/NASCAR sweep of Phoenix and now this, but hey, it’s the 60th year of Team Penske. It’s Roger Penske. Can we give the man his flowers, please?

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.