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.

I am embarrassed by how much I want to camp out at a Japanese McDonald’s for a month and eat three Happy Meals a day until I get all of the GR GT toys.

The ARCA/Trucks/O’Reilly weekend at Rockingham on the Cup Series’ off week was an interesting opportunity this year. NASCAR had a few new marketing strategies to try out, as did its competitors. It was a big Garrett “Cleetus McFarland” Mitchell weekend, and he finished fourth in the ARCA race, which is the best NASCAR-sanctioned finish of his career, if that counts. Then he had his O’Reilly Series debut and finished 32nd, six laps down. Oh well. I’m sure the TV numbers were shockingly good for a non-Cup weekend.

The actual winner of the ARCA race was actual race car driver Tristan McKee, who totally ran the table. Corey Heim showed up to win his 25th Truck Series race and bring his two-week haul up to $150,000, which is probably going into the Cup ride piggy bank, since it seems no one will give him a seat on actual merit, of which he has more than 75% of the Cup field.

Corey Day has stopped destroying race cars for the moment and bagged his first O’Reilly Series pole position, and the race was won by William Sawalich, his first at that level. Rajah Caruth finished fourth, his best at the O’Reilly level, which was awesome, and Sheldon Creed finished sixth, continuing his hot streak. Other than Cleetus, NASCAR’s aspirants had a pretty good weekend.

I regret to report that Super Formula 2026 is looking pretty boring so far now that there are no big-name rookies left. Somebody give Kaku Ohta a full-time job in one of the greatest racing series on Earth so that some other Japanese domestic drivers can have a chance to prove something.

After a dirty Mercedes block at top speed deprived us of an incredibly popular GTD win for the Magnus Racing Aston Martin (sorry for truth-telling), Spencer Pumpelly will get a chance to redeem himself driving Heart of Racing’s car on the streets of Long Beach thanks to Aston factory driver Tom Gamble running the FIA WEC 6 Hours of Imola. Pumpelly last drove for THoR in 2024, winning in class at Canadian Tire Motorsport Park.

I feel like, if a Porsche factory 963 driver still wants to do Le Mans after Porsche pulls out through no fault of any contracted drivers, everyone has to let him, even if it means he, Richard Verschoor, and Doriane Pin will win the LMP2 class by 15 minutes.

At the ripe old age of 31, AF Corse Ferrari driver Vincent Abril has announced his retirement from the pro ranks ahead of the 2026 European season. Abril also drove for Bentley and Mercedes, raced in DTM, and qualified on pole in LMGTE Am at the 2022 24 Hours of Le Mans. That’s a career you’d think most racing drivers would kill for, but when you get to that level and can’t get that one more step beyond it, it must be as frustrating as anything else.

He plans to continue racing at amateur levels, where I am sure he will win frequently and comfortably.

Legendary Bronze driver Ben Keating will miss the first two rounds of the 2026 FIA World Endurance Championship because he broke his elbow, presumably on a bicycle. His seat in the #33 TF Sport Corvette at Imola and Spa will be filled by Blake McDonald, a solid TF Sport operative who drives the Corvette in the Asian Le Mans Series and TF’s LMP2 in the European Le Mans Series.

Thunder Road, the NASCAR-themed TV show AMC announced late last year, is moving along seriously enough to attract Dennis Quaid to star in it. Execs are framing it as “Succession with stock cars,” which I guess does sound cool.

IROC’s second life as a vintage racing series continues to deliver because the drivers who raced in it the first time still have scores to settle. One does not get to see Jeff Gordon drive race cars in anger very much anymore, but at the Ten Tenths Motor Club in Concord, North Carolina, on April 10, one will. The event is called the Heritage Invitational, and it will include Bill Elliott, Mark Martin, Kurt Busch, Scott Pruett, Bobby Labonte, and more.

It has always been fairly clear that the Formula 1 career of Franco Colapinto is driven by surrounding financial interests. If someone keeps getting personally escorted into F1 cars in place of drivers who are at worst equally talented, that’s simply the reasonable conclusion to draw. But the absurdity of going racing that way is becoming ever clearer in this case.

Argentina’s plan for a new grand prix — presumably what this is all ultimately about — is getting pretty real, and Franco will be doing one of those vintage F1 street drifting shows in Buenos Aires in April to hype it up. These moneyed interests would prefer Colapinto not get involved in things like the Suzuka incident while all this is going on, not with the way Argentine sports fans are. Too late, though. Now Alpine has to post unhinged 1,200-word social media statements promising they aren’t sabotaging Franco’s car.

Dystany Spurlock, the former motorcycle drag racer, made her first ARCA start last weekend at Hickory. She stayed in the race all day and finished on the lead lap in 7th place. Her next race is this weekend at Rockingham. “NASCAR has always been my heart,” Spurlock says, and her campaign to make it to that level is off to a great start.

Ford’s track-only supercar has absolutely destroyed the Nürburgring Nordschliefe track record for an American car, putting up a 6:15.9 against the Chevrolet Corvette ZR1X’s 6:49.3. It’s the third-fastest lap ever at the Ring, and it’s the fastest for a car with no hybrid juice. The driver was Fred Vervisch.

After losing the Saudi Arabia round due to senseless war, F1 Academy has responded rapidly by adding third full-points races to its weekends in Canada and the U.S. in 2026. The all-women series gets 14 races per year, and thank goodness they aren’t losing any due to the violence of men.

At last, on the eve of the first race, announced only in Jamie Klein’s Substack without which English speakers simply would not know anything about Japanese racing, we have confirmation that a subscription to Super Formula’s SFgo app will be the only way for international viewers to watch Japan’s top-tier open-wheel championship this year now that Motorsport.tv has been mercifully unplugged.

There may not be any world-renowned drivers left, but the racing is always pretty good. At least there is a way to watch it.

James Warburton has already quit running Supercars once; his first tenure as CEO was from 2013 to 2017. Last year, he stepped into a bit of a power vacuum that had opened up at an inflection point for the series’ international profile, and the Australian motorsports world seemed optimistic that he was the right leader at the right time.

Welp. He’s out again. He will be replaced — at least temporarily — by Barclay Nettlefold, CEO of Racing Australia Consolidated Enterprises (RACE), the group that owns Supercars. I eagerly look forward to hearing more about what’s going on.

Jack Doohan’s winter was not much nicer than his preceding spring, when he was replaced at Alpine F1 by Franco Colapinto for no performance-based reason. He looked set to stay in single-seaters in Super Formula, but that fell through, and the best he could do was land a reserve job at Haas. Well, Doohan wants to keep racing, and he has made the very reasonable choice to enter the European Le Mans Series with Nielsen Racing in the LMP2 Pro/Am category. I bet he’ll be quick.