Ty Gibbs catches a lot of flack for reasons that are rife in motorsports culture. What it comes down to is, not a lot of Cup drivers get 131 starts to prove they are capable of winning a race unless their last name is Gibbs. But Ty finally got it done this weekend, and at Bristol no less. He got it done by staying out on a tire that was well regarded. No way around it, he earned his win, and it’s not like it was a fluke this season, either. He has been running well enough the whole time that all but the most cynical considered it a matter of “when” not “if.”

Also of note in the Cup race was the return of Alex Bowman from his multi-race recuperation from vertigo. While it sounds like he was as worried as I was that he was toast, he was cleared to race and did so without incident.

The truck race was won by Christopher Bell, his first Truck Series win since 2017. Ben Rhodes could have won it; he won stage 2, and he ran at the front, but an alternator issue cost him some track position in the pits, and he ended up 11th. Corey Heim and Christian Eckes also could have won it, but they got into each other in rather spectacular fashion and wrecked. For the amount of temper that appeared to be involved, they both handled it quite maturely.

The O’Reilly race was won by Connor Zilisch — no huge surprise there — but he had to stay out to race a dominant Kyle Larson for it, which was pretty impressive. Brent Crews also showed some fight at the front, but he couldn’t get into a race of that caliber for the lead and finished 3rd. The headlines were almost stolen by a huge engine fire in Mason Maggio’s #91 Chevrolet, which filled the speedway with smoke and red-flagged the race for a bit.

The New Zealand run that forms chapter 2 of the Supercars season is one of the calendar’s masterstrokes. It breaks up the routine, the weather, and the racing, and like many of the Supercars calendar’s segments, it forms a little mini-championship in itself, particularly for the Kiwi drivers. This year it’s a doubleheader at Taupō (a regular feature) and Christchurch (a new venue), and thanks to the looming Cyclone Vaianu, four of the six New Zealand races will be held at the latter, as Sunday’s race 10 was called off.

Race 8 was a show of force from Brodie Kostecki, who is looking like an early championship favorite to me, as he’s keeping his head and driving off like this in races where other contenders are beating and banging and losing time.

Race 9 was the big story, though. The Kiwi drivers and crew members are extra hungry to win in New Zealand, especially with the trophy being named in memory of great Kiwi Supercars driver Jason Richards, and the healthy crowd placed its faith in their own Ryan Wood this round. He delivered. He delivered the new Toyota Supra’s first pole position and first win, and he came out of Taupō leading the JR Trophy standings.

Meanwhile, the Chevrolets were so far off that it triggered (yet another) parity investigation.

The ACO says their plan to launch the next generation of LMP2 in 2028 is still on. They’ll weigh in at 950 kilograms and 563 horsepower (or 420 kilowatts, for the modern sophisticate), driven by a Gibson 3.4-liter twin turbo V6. Expanding from one OEM to two — ORECA and Ligier — is a big step, as it’ll make them compete on price.

UPDATE 4/21: As friend of the site @putdorianedown.bsky.social reminds me, there are actually technically four OEMs in the current LMP2 regulations, but everyone stopped using the non-ORECAs, so it’s a de facto one-make category. Hopefully this 2028 process will be a bit more competitive.

This category is well established around the world in its current form. It’s at the perfect intersection of being a stepping stone to the top level for both teams and drivers, a competitive place for pros piecing a season together to get more seat time, and at least somewhat insulated from the rich and untalented by LMP3. Now is a great time to push it forward.

I hate this so much. Super GT, Japan’s premier sports car championship and the only series left that races Class One cars, had to cancel its Sepang round because the oil shock caused by the U.S./Israel attack on Iran has pushed Malaysia’s economy into a state of emergency. There will now be only seven Super GT rounds in 2026

I will say it again: Motorsports is pro-peace and anti-war!

I applaud NASCAR for finally drawing any sort of line with this guy. After doing basically nothing but spin in any NASCAR races, Cleetus and his employers at Richard Childress Racing felt it was time for him to begin his assigned program getting on TV at superspeedway races, but NASCAR officials have denied him the opportunity until he accomplishes, you know, something. Maybe they calculated that they would get the same amount of YouTube attention for denying him as they would for running him.

Toyota has made a little bit clearer what was previously only slightly clearer than mud about the decision to pull WRC star and aspiring F1 driver Kalle Rovanperä out of Super Formula right before the season started. The issue may indeed be driven by medical conditions, but the bottom line is that he simply wasn’t ready. His winter competition and testing was so fraught with problems (and crashes) that Toyota couldn’t roll him out as their new open-wheel protégé and let him faceplant in front of the world.

Oh well. Maybe next year.

Much of the uncertainty surrounding the 2026 Indy 500 entry list has revolved around the completely mysterious but obviously dire situation at Prema Racing, who would theoretically have access to two Chevy engine leases if they were to — somehow — figure something out. Well, they aren’t going to, and honestly that’s good news at this point so we can get a more interesting grid, but apparently that’s not the end of the story? Sources are telling Marshall Pruett that Prema wants to run something after Indy??

To which I say, uh, like what? You can’t get somebody to pay for the most well attended sporting event on Earth, but you’re going to get somebody to pay you to race in Portland, Oregon, where everyone is a militant bicyclist?? Give me a break, man.

Somebody needs to buy this shop for pennies on the dollar who actually intends to go racing.

Both Chaz Mostert and Ryan Wood have signed on for multiple more years driving for Walkinshaw TWG Racing in Supercars. They won a championship, they rolled out a brand new car and are already super dangerous with it, I would stay, too. Makes perfect sense. What’s crazy is that the Supercars grid is so stacked that I can’t even confidently call them the best duo on it.

Cadillac Hertz Team JOTA driver Alex Lynn has apparently been having trouble with his neck since the end of 2024, and he will have to sit out the first two FIA World Endurance Championship rounds at Imola and Spa. Jack Aitken, driver of current best Cadillac in the world, the Action Express #31 in IMSA, will sub in for him at Spa. Lynn’s first race in 2026 will be Le Mans.

The latest “Red Bull Racing is doomed” news is that Gianpiero Lambiase, the George Martin to Max Verstappen’s Beatles, will leave for McLaren like so many of his Red Bull-heyday colleagues before him. Is this why he was crying on the pit wall after the last race last year? Who can say?

Most of the talk in F1 right now is, of course, about whether Max Verstappen himself will leave not just Red Bull but the sport entirely, and this can’t be unrelated to that. GP will have a broad mandate at McLaren, and the title of Chief Racing Officer, while reporting to Andrea Stella, which many see as the beginnings of a medium-term succession plan, but why wouldn’t GP prefer one of those at Red Bull? Ominous.

Lance Stroll is taking advantage of this year’s surprise war-enforced spring break in Formula 1 to race the Aston Martin Vantage GT3 Evo in GT World Challenge Europe at Paul Ricard. Comtoyou Racing will now field four Vantages in the season opener. Stroll’s co-drivers are ex-F1 driver Roberto Merhi and Aston Martin junior driver Mari Boya.

I hope Lance has a great time. I am so here for stressed out F1 drivers teaching the world about the joys of sports car racing.

I guess I want this to be good news, but honestly I feel only nervousness about Alex Bowman getting back in the car. He’s suddenly okay to race again after problems in his head area that kept him out of four races? His vertigo is all gone now, so he can jump straight in and go race on a halfpipe at Bristol? This seems crazy to me. Hope it goes well, though!!

I have wondered about this museum, but I’ve never been. I noticed it on maps, though, because of its pretentious name. I’m sorry, the International Motorsports Hall of Fame? Is next to Talladega Superspeedway? I mean, I’m sure they have a cool NASCAR section, and George Barber probably gave them some stuff, but… come on.

Well, it turns out to have been run by a guy who thought he was better than everyone, too, and after it came out that he had been skimming off the museum for personal gain to the tune of $236,000, Alabama Governor Kay Ivey dismissed the hall of fame’s entire commission.

Laurin Heinrich simply cannot stop driving race cars. Not deterred by Porsche Penske Motorsport’s lack of seats for him at the short IMSA races, Heinrich is going to drive the other 963 — the JDC-Miller Mustang Sampling one, i.e. the cool one — in the Long Beach race. Could he beat his full-time teammates in the drivers’ championship by throwing in some races in last year’s car? Yes.

It’s weird to think of 2020 as a long time ago, but it definitely was — and it especially was in Formula 1 terms. That was two cars ago now! But nevertheless, Pirelli has decided they want to gather data there, and so Mercedes and McLaren will do some tire testing for them on April 14 and 15.

NASCAR has soft-launched the news that Preseason Thunder is coming back at Daytona International Speedway. On the NASCAR state media Hauler Talk podcast, EVP and chief racing development officer John Probst said they noticed how fans show up for IMSA’s preseason Daytona test and treat it like just another race weekend, so they figured it’s bad business not to do the stock car version, too.

But more poignantly: Remember a couple months back when weather was ruining the Clash at Bowman Gray, and everybody started chattering about bringing the Clash back to Daytona? Well, the joke was made regarding this new development, and Probst basically responded in the Monty Python wink-wink nudge-nudge voice.

Every annual race at Bathurst has legitimate reasons for it to be your favorite, but I always want my favorite to be the 6 Hour. Not because it’s the most impressive motor race or display of cars but because of what it represents. It’s possibly the finest example left on Earth of a truly grassroots endurance sports car race on one of the world’s greatest circuits that anybody determined enough can just up and do. And racing on Mount Panorama is extremely challenging, which is what makes the camaraderie and down-home-ness of the 6 Hour all the more lovable.

2026 has been an especially tough year on the Mountain, though. Ironically, the glory days of motor racing we are currently in is making the Mount Panorama Circuit harder to navigate — and harder to officiate — and it was already hard enough. And the 12 Hour and the 1000 have big money behind them; the 6 Hour is a different story. This year’s running was made even harder by the stupid war and its impact on fuel prices, but heading into the Easter race weekend, the organizers secured the fuel, they improved their safety practices, and they landed a new long-term deal. These all felt like great omens.

And the Bathurst 6 Hour deserves every chance. Between the incredible support series and the big race itself, it’s like a dream come true for anybody aspiring to be at the pinnacle of Australian motor racing. It has this come-one, come-all attitude. It’s the big Bathurst race for Aussie Racing Cars and Trans Am, and this year they even found a home for the wayward Australian TCR cars — their debut at Bathurst!

And the 6 Hour itself involves all kinds of crazy cars run by small-town teams and whole families and hobbyists and club racers and whoever else wants in… starting alongside a bunch of current Supercars drivers. It’s like if there were a run-what-you-brung open-wheeler race at the Indianapolis Motor Speedway, and Kyle Kirkwood and Scott Dixon and Christian Rasmussen all liked to show up and have a crack.

The racing is, of course, amazing. So it’s a shame that this year it was run on a tire that active Supercars drivers Jayden Ojeda called “scary.”. It’s a shame that oil slicks resulted in high-speed crashes at the top of the mountain. And it’s a shame that another Bathurst race this year was marred by a horrendous crash resulting in broken backs and hospitalizations. It makes me sad to feel any shadow at all over a glorious day of racing on Mount Panorama, and it keeps happening.

Automotive News says they have a source from a “major GM supplier” claiming that GM is going to introduce a new Buick sedan on the same platform upon which the upcoming generation of Cadillac CT5 and Camaro will be built. I am sure they won’t bother, but that sure does sound like it would make a fine Cup car.

After 160 starts and a best finishing result of P6, Nicolas Hamilton will get a real shot in the British Touring Car Championship this year driving an EXCELR8 Motorsport Hyundai i30 N Fastback, a race-winning car run by the teams’ championship-defending Team VERTU. I hope we get to see two Hamiltons atop podiums this year.

After successfully stealing four cars in two days, a 39-year-old man with a shotgun made a mistake on the streets of Toowoomba. He tried to steal a car from Bob Power, father of other noted wild-eyed crazy man with affection for automobiles, Will Power. The carjacker had a shotgun. Bob Power did not. Nevertheless, he fought off the attacker until the police arrived. The carjacker is now in custody, and Bob Power still has his car.