I find it satisfying that a serious NASCAR team will still fire a driver for being homophobic in, you know, these times. I take it to mean that humanity is fundamentally holding together.

This whole incident unfolded exactly as it should. NASCAR blocked him from competing until they saw what his employer would do, and as it is fundamentally an HR issue, they let the team handle it. Now NASCAR can return to a neutral position knowing full well this idiot will not get back into NASCAR racing with any grown-up operation.

This is a juicy one. The Red Bull-sponsored Team Australia trophy truck duo of Toby Price and Brent Bauman have been disqualified from the SCORE International San Felipe 250 off-road race in Mexico, having finished 17th. They are accused of placing rocks in the path of their competitors according to some inconclusive but certainly sketchy Instagram videos. Both driver and navigator deny the allegations, but they have resigned from competition, you know, just in case.

I might as well go on record here: I do not find the zMAX CARS Tour worthy of the hype, which can be easily generated by its racing celebrity owners despite the racing product being consistently unwatchable.

I love short-track late model racing. I would watch it pretty much anywhere, and I have watched probably a dozen CARS Tour races hoping they’re going to be great before giving up. The (relatively) high profile of the series has created so much thirst around it, and what all that has led to is fields packed full of moronic drivers trying to prove something. I don’t think I’ve watched a single event that didn’t end hours late because of endless cautions.

But last weekend’s CARS Tour race at Wake County Speedway — which I did not watch — sounds like it was on another level entirely. Basically, take the normal out-of-their-minds CARS Tour drivers and throw in the series utterly bungling the fuel requirements of the event, and you get this generational tirade from Landon Huffman, who won the race.

Lola is doing much more to distinguish itself in its motor racing comeback attempt than I expected. Apparently as a way of showing off its prowess in composite manufacturing, it has just announced a new T70.

It’s based on the Mk3B that won the 24 Hours of Daytona in 1969, but instead of being made of fiberglass, the bodywork is a demonstration of a new process Lola is calling the Lola Natural Composite System (LNCS). It has been granted an FIA passport making it eligible for historic racing (despite having a contemporary Chevrolet V8 inside), and there will be 16 road-legal versions sold to the fabulously wealthy as well.

I was worried about Wickens’ fairytale comeback getting curtailed after a little bit of a news quiet period, but it is to my huge relief that he is confirmed to be back in the DXDT Corvette for this year’s short races starting at Long Beach. Even better, he has declared his intent to race the full season next year.

There’s just nobody who does it like the Aussies. It’s no longer surprising to see any given Australian road racing series put on door-to-door nail-biters; what impresses me now is seeing what kinds of crazy mixtures of series promoters can pull together.

This weekend’s Phillip Island SRO opener had all the usual SRO sports car classes driven by a mix of extremely eager aspirants and Supercars drivers, but to me what stole the show was the debut of Mustang Cup Australia (which also featured several Supercars drivers). I challenge anyone to come up with a more dramatic first-ever race of a new championship than this one:

This is Cameron passing Golding for the win, +0.006

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— Jon 🛞 (@jon.turningfortune.com) Mar27, 2026 at 9:42 PM

Seeing that ending does not spoil it, of course, because it was a coin flip. Watch the whole thing.

I don’t know why people insist on being hipsters about SRO-sanctioned sports car racing, but they’re missing out. These grids are all stacked. SRO championships are not just giving ams more way to spend money; they’re filling in the gaps allowing each global region’s working sports car drivers to have careers.

The three-hour opener of the top-class GT World Challenge America was won by the JMF Motorsports #34, a Mercedes-AMG GT3 customer team fielding Michai Stephens and a Mercedes driver with whom you may be familiar named Mikael Grenier. This team and car has been dominant at Sonoma the past couple years, but this was the beginning of the three-hour GTWC America race format, and the #34 proved they can keep going all day if they have to.

The other big story to my eye is that Westin Workman and Tyler Gonzalez are absolutely unstoppable in their #68 GR Supra in Pirelli GT4 America. It’s worth watching those races just to see if anybody’s got anything for them.

There were a few interesting standouts from NASCAR’s Martinsville weekend.

Short-track legend Lee Pulliam is one of those guys who spent his career working on racing instead of schmoozing and therefore never got a big break. Dale Earnhardt, Jr. cannot resist such a story and gave Pulliam a great Martinsville car, and Pulliam almost pulled it out. He led confidently throughout the race, but the unfamiliar equipment got the better of him. He missed shifts and spun wheels on restarts, eventually making the wrong kind of headlines by stacking up the field into a huge wreck. Don’t let that overwrite the fact that he got a top-five finish and took responsibility for the mistakes, which is a good teaching for O’Reilly Series drivers. Pulliam’s teammate, Justin Allgaier, pulled out another win. He really is the last of the Busch Series legends.

As for the Cup race, here are my headlines:

• Shane van Gisbergen qualified fifth. Get your affairs in order, Cup drivers.
• Chase Elliott got a win so early in the season that he surprised himself. It is very interesting to see him have an upturn in results now that people actually have to run consistently all year, because last year he showed that few of them can do that as well as he can.

I see no reason to continue writing diatribes about the 2026 Formula 1 regulations every time a race happens, but here’s what I want to say:

• The drivers have warned the whole time that the speed differentials caused by regeneration would lead to bad wrecks, and that did indeed happen in Japan. Thank God, Ollie Bearman is okay after a terrifying crash trying to avoid Franco Colapinto’s crawling Alpine. It should not have gotten to this point. That said, there are procedural ways to rectify this; it doesn’t prove regenerative braking is some fundamentally bad idea.

• Qualifying did borderline suck this time. The tweaks to regeneration capacity were not enough. The cars need more power in qualifying — from the V6 — and I hope they get it over the war-induced break. Charles Leclerc has toed the line for the first couple races, but this time he snapped because he tried to do what Charles Leclerc does — hurl the car in qualifying — and the car would not let him.

• It’s beginning to seem like some sources were misleading about how much of this new stuff is under manual driver control. I don’t think I’m alone in having been given the impression that drivers would be able to manipulate this stuff to extract the maximum from it, but it’s starting to come out that — at least the way some teams have chosen to implement things — the computer is taking the car out of their hands from time to time, sometimes at unconscionable moments. To the extent I am susceptible to turning against these regs, it is here: If the driver makes control inputs that the car does not obey, and there’s nothing broken, that’s unacceptable.

• That’s all the bad stuff. Racing at Suzuka is back. People who think the only legitimate form of passing is out-braking someone need to get over it. People who believe overtakes no longer require any skill or setup are just wrong. This is a new kind of F1 racing. The yo-yo part is not the pass. It can take several laps to determine whether a pass has been completed or not, and that is awesome. Think about how much of the Japanese Grand Prix in recent years was devoted to nothing happening. Now you have to watch every lap in order to see whether what looks like what’s happening is really going to happen or not. Stakes!

• Max Verstappen is annoying and whiny, but it’s still good for the sport that he’s throwing a tantrum. It’s the strongest leverage available against FOM and the FIA for the drivers to fix what is really wrong with the regs (they won’t be able to change the things they personally dislike but are actually good).

• Cars being unreliable is good, actually, and so many people I see online complaining about it were — just before this season started — talking about how boring F1 is now that the cars don’t blow up anymore.

• Even if not a single team can get close to Mercedes this year — and of course they will — Kimi versus George is going to be one for the ages.

Every nominee for the NASCAR Hall of Fame Class of 2027 is deserving, but I’m ready to predict right now that the Modern Era inductees will be Greg Biffle and Kevin Harvick.

The greatest racing championship on Earth is putting over 400 races from 1997 to 2025 up on its already extensive YouTube channel in an initiative it’s calling Supercars Throwback. It is not possible for me to exaggerate how much I revere this championship. You should watch all 400+ races.

Formula 1 remains as Formula 1 as ever before, and I will never hesitate to report on that. A shipment of 12 “tonnes” (whatever those are) of The Official Chocolate Bar of Formula 1® — F1-car-shaped KitKat bars — was intercepted somewhere between Italy and Poland and has apparently been stolen.

Honestly, this probably accomplishes the brand objectives of this partnership better than selling the chocolate ever possibly could, and the PR statements are all too knowing about it. Maybe it was staged.

I wholeheartedly agree with Peter Posavac: One BMW Z4 GT3 at the 24H Nurburgring is not enough.

Posavac posted on social media that he would enter a Z4 in the N24 this year if the post got 5,000 likes, and I salute the internet for making it happen.

Last year, I was at the Grand Prix of Alabama, and I had no patience for everybody’s whining about how uninteresting it was to watch an Álex Palou beatdown there. This time was different, and not just because I (sadly) wasn’t there. This wouldn’t have been a beatdown if Arrow McLaren hadn’t absolutely gagged on Christian Lundgaard’s last pitstop. I said it on the skyline, and I’ll say it again here:

There is too much choking in the pits in this championship

— Jon 🛞 (@jon.turningfortune.com) Mar29, 2026 at 2:46 PM

I was glad to see Graham Rahal get a good result because it gives me hope for the RLL resurgence; the series needs another competitive team, and Mick Schumacher needs a competitive car. Mick is clearly taking some time to bed into IndyCar, but I continue to believe he can get his sea legs.

I am beginning to worry about Will Power, but I will keep the faith.

This is mostly just an update to show you the absolute state Honda and Aston Martin F1 are in. I would love to draw some conclusions about what the ground truth is here, but I can’t because the companies are now actually competing for the media narrative, which is a rather bad situation. Suffice it to say, they are a long way from getting out of the mess that is their 2026 Formula 1 car, and if Jonathan Wheatley really quit Audi to go work at Aston Martin, I dearly hope he doesn’t regret it for the rest of his life.

This seems like a cautionary tale for U.S. communities who are letting their race tracks close. There’s only one thing a giant, available plot of land in this country gets turned into these days, and that’s a big ol’ creepy-sounding AI data center. The racist-ly named Wampum I, LLC, a Delaware shell company with the same address as a developer called Provident Data Centers, has just paid $130,000 per acre for the beloved Pitt Race International complex, and you can practically hear the self-driving bulldozers already.

Staff reserve drivers have not really been a thing IndyCar like they are in F1 for reasons that are surely financial as well as cultural, but that’s starting to change. Hunter McElrea only has one IndyCar start, and it didn’t go great, but he was runner up in the 2023 IndyNXT championship and a heavily decorated IMSA sports car driver, so it definitely seems like a good idea to have him around the paddock.

Mirco Schultis is picking out GT America races in which to give this beloved C7 Corvette GT3 its last hurrah, as 2026 is the car’s last year of FIA homologation for active GT3 competition. It may not be the end of the road if there are classic races where it makes sense to take this thing, but it won’t be able to race with its younger siblings anymore. The first appearance of the year will be at this weekend’s SRO America opener at Sonoma.

Man, I am going to miss looking at this thing. I guess I should see if any diecasts are available.

Can I have it when you’re done

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— Jon 🛞 (@jon.turningfortune.com) March27, 2026 at 10:24 AM

Lionspeed GP will return to the Pro class of the Nürburgring 24 Hours for the first time since 2023, and they are bringing a serious driver lineup to pilot their Porsche 911. Laurens Vanthoor and Ricardo Feller — the past two years’ winners, respectively — will be joined by former Rexy driver and current Porsche Penske 963 driver Laurin Heinrich for his second crack at this race; the first was also in 2023.

I don’t want to give Max Verstappen credit for everything, but there sure are a lot of teams bringing cars to the N24 this year to try and beat him.

Lamborghini factory driver Marco Mapelli, whom IMSA fans will know from the Pfaff #9, will contest the DTM for the first time this year to introduce the new Temerario GT3. He will drive alongside Luca Engstler for ABT Sportsline.