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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?

I briefly met Álex Palou the day after this ruling came out, and he was funny and relaxed. He was sitting at the Acura activation in the Daytona infield with all of the other Acura GTP drivers, and he was actually the only one acting funny and relaxed. The next day, he was one of the fastest guys in the Rolex 24. So I don’t think losing this case is weighing the guy down; he will soon win his way out of the hole, whether he’s paying out of pocket or Ganassi is covering it.

Regardless, this was a dumb situation, and I’m glad it’s over. You can’t break contracts, but also I would easily believe that Zak Brown or authorized associates gave Palou enough hope about F1 to be described afterwards as “misleading.” It sure is tempting to imagine what the 2025 Formula 1 season would have been like with Lando Norris facing Álex Palou in the other seat. But on the other hand, by staying with Ganassi in IndyCar, Palou has made himself a sort of analogue of Verstappen rather than having to go head-to-head with him.

I am not the only person here in Daytona who thinks it’s weird that the Whelen Caddy managed to use up its whole plank in just the handful of laps it ran in qualifying. I’m not alleging or insinuating anything; ride heights are real, and DQs happen. I just usually see this happen to a car after a full race distance. It had to be running pretty durn low!

Yes, I did enjoy watching the movie, but that is not my take. My take is that no matter what you thought of this movie, a lot of people liked it. Like, very many. Enough to make the movie a monster smash hit by the standards of the day. If you like car racing, but you’re mad the world liked this movie, you need to take a look at yourself. People who actually work in racing are thrilled about how popular F1 is, even in what you might think are “rival” series. More people liking racing is good for racing. You know, I bet the Venn diagram of people who hate the F1 movie and people think Formula 1 sucks now is a circle. Why don’t you go watch some racing you think is better than F1 and let people enjoy things?

Accessibility is one of Formula 1’s greatest strengths. It is getting millions of people interested in racing. We want the Best Picture of the Year to be F1: The Movie, don’t you see?

It may be long overdue, but Toyota is about to field the coolest GT3 car, if you ask me. Execs have said the GR GT should be on the grid in Daytona in 2027, and the Lexus factory program will be rebranded Gazoo Racing.

When I talked to the Vasser Sullivan Lexus drivers at the Daytona 24 last week, they all seemed rather ready to dispense with the Lexus RC F GT3, which is a platform nearly as old as the DW12 Indy car. I don’t blame them. The success of GT3 as a category is almost impossible to exaggerate, and that has led to a long reign for some of its most glorious examples, as well as compounding gains through multiple evolutions from several OEMs. But it’s time for some new race cars, and we’ll see if it’s Toyota or Lamborghini that kicks off the avalanche.

After finally and blessedly winning the F1 Academy championship, we were still left to wonder all over again what would happen to Doriane Pin. Well, Mercedes-AMG has given her a development driver job, and that’s wonderful, but what happens after that?

You could argue this is the same kind of slightly creepy individualized attention Mercedes gave to Kimi Antonelli as they groomed him into a Formula 1 driver, but the circumstances are pretty different, and also they don’t have a 40-year-old driver to replace anymore. But hey, there are a lot of Mercedes customers on the F1 grid. I think she’s gonna make it.

Should-be FIA president Tim Mayer is traveling to Daytona today where he says he will meet with NASCAR CEO/chairman and IMSA team owner Jim France during the Rolex 24 weekend. Mayer is looking for his next move after his doomed but symbolically important FIA presidential campaign, and he says it would be nice to find a “paying gig.”

Mayer was catching up with an old friend — Julie Bentley, president of the International GT racing series — at the gate for a Wednesday afternoon flight from Atlanta to Daytona Beach. I was, uh, well, eavesdropping, and now we are all on the flight to Daytona together. I am sitting next to a guy who spots for Graham Rahal in IndyCar. He used to spot for the RLL BMW prototypes at IMSA races, but that working relationship did not survive BMW’s transition of that program to the European W Racing Team that runs the cars in the World Endurance Championship. He wasn’t going to be working the Rolex at all, but he got a last-minute call from a friend to spot for the Era Motorsport #18 LMP2 running Jacob Abel, Ferdinand Habsburg, Naveen Rao, and Logan Sargeant.

Anyway, that’s all completely irrelevant. Mayer gave a fascinating account of the FIA presidential campaign and how self-appointed-president-for-life Mohammed bin Sulayem recruited select regional leaders to lock out the ballot for him. No new scandals or anything were revealed, but Mayer figures one will bring down MBS sooner or later.

“Mohammed is one of those guys where you’re either an enemy or you’re a future enemy,” Mayer told Bentley, and this paranoid style of motorsport governance will surely fail, as motor racing runs on friendships, and MBS will eventually have none.

Mayer was seated in first class. I intended to say “Thank you for trying” to him as I passed in the aisle, but he was extremely conspicuousky fake-listening to his phone while looking out the window.

I’m pretty excited for the portfolio Racing America has put together as a streaming service this year. They’re becoming a one-stop shop for grassroots American pavement racing, which is something I very much want to have. Trans Am is the headlining series, and I’m already in love with its current revival movement now that I’ve been to a race. Getting a heavy hitter to do the broadcasts is going to make a big difference to the product. No shade to what they had before, but it was pretty shoestring last year.

Everybody got very excited when Toyota upped its involvement with Haas F1 this year by becoming its title sponsor, but I think it was clear from the jump that this was going to be a confusing development when the branding in the team name was obscured as “TGR Haas F1 Team.”

Things got much worse, of course, when Toyota revealed at an absurd launch event that it would be splitting its motorsports operations into two. Toyota Racing is now the name of the central factory-run racing operations run out of the Cologne facility where the WEC team is, where the engine programs are, and where the people working with Haas are, too. Gazoo Racing is now for more customer-ish-flavored programs, such as the rally program, which is “supported by Toyota Racing.” I guess that’s what NASCAR and Supercars cars are going to be badged as, too? Anyway, you can see why it would be confusing, then, for Toyota to announce “TGR” branding for its F1 partnership the same year.

Today Haas revealed the car — which looks very good, I might add — and it has “GR” all over it. Nary a “Toyota” in sight. What are we to make of this? Well, surely this is more of a customer relationship; Toyota is giving Haas people, expertise, and facilities, but it’s not building them a chassis (Dallara) or a power unit (Ferrari). I guess we have to think about the GR branding as a sort of essence of going racing with Toyota in spirit, and a race car can’t say “Toyota” on it unless Toyota itself is going racing.

MX-5 was already the best, but now I think absolutely everyone realizes it. In a year that is kicking off at Daytona with Westin Workman cleaning up in a GT4 car and Connor Zilisch driving a damn Cadillac, Whelen Mazda MX-5 has more entries than it has ever had.

All my adult life, I have struggled mightily — probably way too much, really — with the question, “What do you do?” I have always just been so resistant to answering it in the careerist, class-conscious terms in which it is so typically meant.

I have so many answers to that question that I find delightful — even in those rare intervals when my answer has described my J-O-B — but it’s so frequently perplexing or embarrassing to give those answers. Because honestly, my answer-of-answers to that question is, “Whatever keeps me up all night with furious passion, no matter what anyone else thinks of it,” and for whatever constellation of reasons, it seems like most people don’t want to hear that answer.

That furious passion has led me all over the place, reading and writing and wandering around various realms, trying to get to the bottom of them. Finally, as I entered that male-midlife phase where everybody says this exact thing will happen, it led me to motorsport. And that was the place where I first felt surrounded by people who do whatever their furious passion keeps them up at night doing, no matter what anyone else thinks of it, because it keeps all of them — and now also me — up all night doing this.

Practically, “what I do” is some form of journalism. Always has been. That is the methodology by which I participate in the ecosystems of the things that inspire my furious passion. By now, I have learned how to get up to speed quite quickly on new things using journalistic tools. Even so, I immediately clocked the incredible vastness of motor racing, despite it all having taken place in barely 100 years. This is part of what drew me in; I love an intellectual challenge.

My moment of drawing into motorsport was in the spring of 2024. Finally, all the near-miss interests I’ve had — cars, planes and trains as a kid, rock music as a youth, technology, politics, massive festivals (and their operations and logistics, including countless drives of hundreds of miles across flat tarmac with no one else in sight), and most of all just the creative and spiritual urge that drives human beings to do crazy things together — coalesced into one blinding moment of inspiration, and I asked my internet friend, Luke, if he would be so kind as to “pill me” — in the vernacular of the sewers where we hung out online in those days — on motorsports.

And pill me he did.

As I spent month after month drawing ever deeper into the caverns of motor racing lore in which Luke had — through the influence of his father — spent his whole life, Luke was my continual guide. He showed me the parts he loved, explained why, had me watch race after race, encouraging me when I did get it and redirecting me when I didn’t. As my confidence grew along with my situational awareness, as I watched races both in real-time and from history, I checked in with Luke constantly, making sure I was taking away what I was meant to.

After a while, I developed opinions, particular passions, favorite cars and drivers and tracks and engine configurations, and I began to spread my wings a little bit. Luke and I met on social media, in scenes convened around very different subjects, and together we sought out places where we could grow our sphere of motorsports connections online, meet more people like us. We first struck gold on Bluesky, and by now quite a little scene has formed. However long that app lasts, it no longer matters so much, because we’ve met enough of the people — who probably comprise all of the people reading this on the day of its publication — that this familial love of racing has crossed the bridge into the real world.

Naturally, we had to go racing. Once again, I let Luke be my guide, and we settled on the 63rd running of the Rolex 24 at Daytona in 2025 as our first in-person race meeting. In fact, it was the first time Luke and I had met in person, let alone met the online racing friends we had just gathered around us in the preceding year. And now we go to races together all the time, making ever more motorsports culture and collective memory.

From very early on in our shared racing life, Luke and I knew we wanted to do some kind of project together. In my case, a project almost always means a website, but I needed that time to dig in and learn what kind of website the racing world would want from me. As the 2025 racing year went on, I realized more and more clearly that the story of me learning the story of racing from Luke might make for an ideal meta-story about how racing — lineage-driven thing that it is — is sustained and passed on through the twists, turns, and tight corners of — if we’re being honest here — the heart of modern economic, geographic, and political history. And, ideally, that will make Turning Fortune an ideal vehicle — pun flagrantly intended — for motor racing’s continued transmission into the future.

So that, in essence, is what Turning Fortune is. Thank you for joining us. Please have a wander about the News, Lore, and Journals sections and get a sense of what they are, and if you want a little more biography on us, visit About.

You can subscribe to our posts via RSS (primary feed links in the footer, and all topics have feeds as well), and we will also send a monthly-ish newsletter that will not simply duplicate or summarize website content but will be an actual letter, from me, maybe sometimes from Luke, about random stuff, like an email should be.

We are @jon.turningfortune.com and @luke.turningfortune.com on Bluesky, and we hang out there and post with people about cars and racing allllllllllllllllllll day. At least I do; Luke seems to be a lot more virtuous than I am in the paying-attention-to-mundane-life department. You can also follow @turningfortune.com, which will be more or less a summary of website contents for those who will not use RSS for some reason.

Our Instagram and Threads accounts are pretty much obligatory and will hopefully someday be totally unnecessary, but they do exist. YouTube, however, will absolutely be a creative outlet meriting serious effort from us. We have a little bit of low-grade experimentation up there already, and we will gradually be figuring out how to do more, so do please very much subscribe to the Turning Fortune YouTube channel.

And if you’ll be in Daytona for the 64th Rolex 24, we’ll be there for the whole event. If you see us, please flag us down, because we have tons of little race cars and Turning Fortune stickers to disgorge into your backpack.

I should hasten to add, this website is the handiwork of my colleagues, design partner Ashley McQuaid and engineering partner Phil Giammattei, at the Tiger Pajamas Web Site Company, where We’ll Make a Good Web Site for You™. It says so right in our jingle.

You see, I am their publishing partner (a.k.a. test and development driver), and so to an extent there actually is a straightforward answer to “what do I do?”, it’s “make websites like the one you are reading now.” If you are interested in one, please let us know.

I confess to having a pretty hard time following the Chili Bowl. It’s just so long and grueling, and the lower brackets put on such bad racing. But that’s because there are HUNDREDS of cars in this thing, and when the cream is finally done rising to the top, it’s usually hardworking aspirant dirt racers versus active top-tier NASCAR Cup Series drivers and the who’s-who of full-time sponsored sprint car drivers and USAC midget champions, not to mention people who have been slogging to win this specific event year after year after year.

One of those aspirants won it this time. I had already tired out by the time the final came on, but I think I’ll go back and watch to get to know Emerson Axsom better. If you win the Chili Bowl, you are special by definition.

Ugo Ugochukwu is the driver after this year’s Castrol Toyota Formula Regional Oceania Trophy (CTFROT, which, upsettingly, they pronounce as an acronym) who raised eyebrows the highest in their four-race event at Taupo this weekend. He has never stood out that much in Formula 3, but he showed some people up at the beginning of this race meeting. But by the end, Supercars star Ryan Wood was up to speed, and he got to hoist a trophy in front of his home crowd. It must feel pretty good to be him lately.

This is also the series where Kalle Rovanperä is beginning his single-seater odyssey, and he did not do so well. I wonder if things are going to pick up for him before the Super Formula season starts.

As I hoped, the entry-level IMSA series is looking fire this year. There are dominant figures in both the LMP3 and GSX classes, but one must observe how Oscar Tunjo and Westin Workman swept both races. The first one was straightforward, but the second one was a slithery wet race, and Workman had significant car problems at the start. There is serious talent coming up the ranks.

When I look at the Roar results, I see some into which I can put some stock. The way Will Power and Chaz Mostert drove in this test, when I see Kenny Habul within a couple tenths of the fastest time across GTD and GTD Pro, I reckon the 75 is going to be quick. But when the Porsche 963s are bunched up like that, and the Banana Boat is right there despite running last year’s car, I just figure nobody in GTP is showing what they’ve got.

The internet loves to hate, but the Michelin 24H Dubai is not a joke race. Okay, there are some joke cars, but racing GT3 cars competitively for 24 hours is never a joke. The M4 clearly has an edge here, and WRT is one of the highest-level outfits that shows up for this thing, but they still deserve full credit for execution in this race. You’d expect WRT to be spread a bit thin right now, given that they’re about to run the prototypes in IMSA for the first time, but it sure didn’t show in Dubai.