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.

I don’t know why I expected differently, since it’s in keeping with major Penske sponsor relationships since time immemorial, but David Malukas’ car is going to look exactly the same as Will Power’s did. Amusingly, Verizon is sort of a laughing-stock brand right now after a huge outage a couple weeks ago, but I’m sure the poor corporation will weather the storm, just like the IndyCar Series that used to bear its name.

You know what, though? I am not sure I considered the scope and magnitude of Antics possible with Scott McLaughlin and David Malukas on the same team. There is some endearing potential here. Anybody heard from Josef?

I don’t have any sympathy for those whining about some F1 teams exploiting badly written regulations to get more horsepower. Have your billion-dollar profitable organizations forgotten how to go racing? Formula 1 is a competition to see who can build the fastest car and who can drive it the fastest. If you’re leaving anything on the table, you lose. Better luck next year.

I am sure the FIA will figure out how to firmly close this loophole in due time and make everyone’s race cars as slow as everyone else’s. That is also nothing to whine about. Everybody out there is trying to make you go slower, not just the guys in the air-conditioned box. You have to beat all of them.

This kid has been working hard and racing everywhere, and even if he never makes it to F1, it will have been a great move by Audi to download his brain while building a new driver development program from the ground up. That said, I reckon his chances of an Audi F1 seat are quite good. Audi did not opt for the full Cadillac Maneuver of signing two old hands; they split the difference by retaining Nico Hülkenberg while rolling the dice on Gabriel Bortoleto, which seems to have worked out. By the time Bortoleto is in his prime as a driver, Slater will be ready to take him on.

Toyota and Ferrari have now made public noises about being at a tire data disadvantage to OEMs that compete in the IMSA WeatherTech SportsCar Championship. Michelin has rolled out its new, crazy-looking endurance tire at Daytona, and it performed superbly. Toyota and Ferrari only compete in the FIA WEC, and thus Aston Martin, BMW, and Cadillac will have an advantage of many hours of real running data over them. I have an idea of how they could fix that for next time.

One week we’re watching the Rebel Rock Racing Aston Martin Vantage GT4 clean house in the Daytona Michelin Pilot Challenge race, and the next we learn they’re bumping up to GT3 but doing it in SRO America. I think I like this move. This team seems to be proceeding carefully and deliberately and making sure the results are there as they go. I’m sure they’ll bring the new Aston to IMSA once they’re sure they can win.

As a huge WRC fan as of watching the 2026 Rallye Monte-Carlo highlights last night, I am thrilled about this possibility. The U.S. hasn’t been on the WRC schedule since the ’70s, and I honestly think it could be a sea change for global rally and American motorsports alike. High-level rally racing seems perfectly suited to the American automotive temperament. If this is really happening next year, do not be surprised to see me there.

On balance, I have to accept that this is a good move in a string of good moves from NASCAR lately, several of which entail returning to more traditional ways of doing things on the competition side after decades of fruitless misadventure. People don’t like the Roval, it hasn’t produced a great race in a while, so be it. More much-needed fan service.

However. When it was just eliminating “win and you’re in” playoff eligibility, I refused to believe the conspiracy theories that Shane van Gisbergen humiliating the Americans in 2025 was the true motivation for finally making competition changes that were long-needed for more important reasons. But now that there is no longer any road course race in the Chase, my brow is beginning to furrow.

But like, if you’re going to have a road course in the Chase, make it Watkins Glen. That would even make sense in the calendar. Instead, they did the opposite this year and moved Watkins Glen to May. Go figure.

Maybe other people aren’t surprised by this given how obvious it was that something was wrong at Prema, but I felt like at least personnel at the IndyCar level were sending weak business-as-usual signals, and it’s not like media day requires a full complement to fake your way through it. I think we can take this as confirmation that, whatever team is bringing any of these assets to the IndyCar grid in any capacity this year, it’s not going to be called Prema. They can’t even be in that uniform on camera anymore.

My understanding is that the Nürburgring 24 is one of the last bastions of gonzo run-what-you-brung sports car racing culture, both for the competitors and the fans. It hasn’t entered the ✌️ “Platinum Age™” ✌️ yet. This year, two moves by the Nürburgring Langstrecken-Serie (NLS) suggest that it is about to. It is jerking around people who want to run weird cars, which sucks, and it is moving entire events so Max Verstappen can participate, which I can understand, but it also sucks. Not everyone has Max Verstappen/Mercedes-AMG money to change their travel and motor racing plans at the last minute.

Williams had a great 2025 season, so something is going right there, but we were also particularly impressed because of the loud noises the team had made all year about having diverted its development attention to the 2026 car as early as possible. The whole Vowles Doctrine seems to have been short-term pain for 2026 gain, and with the Mercedes power unit assumed to be the best, Williams had pegged the expectation-meter going into the new rule set.

And now, on the eve of the first chance the teams get to run the new car in earnest, Williams is not going to be ready. They’re being extremely cagey about details, and rumors about what went wrong keep gaining steam and then getting punctured, so we’ll have to wait for Vowles to explain himself, but there is no spinning this. Cadillac ran the test. They didn’t exist last year. What is Williams’ excuse?