Alongside her Super2 campaign, Alice Buckley will run another full season of TA2 in Australia. The two cars will share many sponsors, but the TA2 Camaro will mainly be imposingly branded as a factory Chevrolet Performance car. Watch out for this one.

Is there anyone who still thinks NASCAR shouldn’t race road courses? There shouldn’t be. After what we saw this weekend — especially in St. Petersburg with the Truck Series — it should be obvious that turning right from time to time has made the entire field better in all three series.

Well, that said, the O’Reilly series still has some work to do. No, Connor Zilisch didn’t win, but he did beat Shane van Gisbergen to pole. That is to say, Shane van Gisbergen was in this race, and yes, he won. At one point, he passed five cars at once and flashed them the deuce as he left.

On Sunday, though, things changed.

Now, Connor was in it. He drove a great race, he just didn’t get anything to show for it because of misfortunes. He is having the rough entry to the Cup Series that everyone should have expected because he is racing with people at a much higher level than the people he humiliated in Xfinity last year.

Shane was also, of course, in it. His road racing skills have clearly benefitted the whole team; Shane is now P5 in points, taking second in stage 1 and in the final result (plus another point for P10 in stage 2), but Ross Chastain won the first stage.

Christopher Bell, last year’s winner, placed third. His teammate, Ty Gibbs, showed a compelling fourth. Their teammate, Denny Hamlin — the guy who hates road courses — finished P10, which he said afterward was “like a win” because of how resistant he is to races with right turns. That feeling, however, may have been colored by something else.

Namely that Denny is the co-owner of the car that won the race. And last week’s race at Atlanta. And the Daytona 500.

Yes, the first driver in the history of NASCAR to win the first three races of the season was the driver of the No. 45 23XI racing Chumba Casino Toyota Camry, Tyler Reddick.

ICON

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— Victoria Beaver (@toribeav42.bsky.social) March 1, 2026 at 10:51 PM

So, the IndyCar season started. Álex Palou won, wow, no way. Everybody else fumbled the ball. The tires sucked; the soft tire lasted like 30 laps and made no difference. There was racing, don’t get me wrong, just none with Palou. What would have been the most interesting headline — Mick Schumacher’s first IndyCar race — has not even happened yet because Sting Ray Robb and Santino Ferrucci continue to waste space on the IndyCar grid and wrecked Mick out on his first lap. Mick’s takeaway was that he has to qualify better so he can stay away from the idiots. Good learning, Mick. Have fun at Phoenix.

MX-5 Cup also raced, and they were fun as always, but nothing remarkable happened. The conditions were pretty wet for the first race, but it mostly just resulted in crashing rather than standout performances. Bobby Gossett stuck it out and won his first MX-5 Cup race, so congratulations to him. Justin Adakonis also got his first win in race 2, congrats to him as well. Earl Bamber did fine. Sébastien Bourdais did not do fine.

The highlight of the St. Petersburg race weekend was the first ever street race of the NASCAR Truck Series. The star studs in the star-studded lineup did make their appearances. Colin Braun finished best of the guests in P9, but he was the one with meaningful NASCAR experience. James “Jimmy Hinch” Hinchcliffe finished right behind him in P10, which was actually the most impressive drive any guest had because he was turned around by Dario Franchitti early on, then turned himself around a couple times, and he still drove through the pack. But — against what probably anybody in the entire world expected — the star of the first ever NASCAR Truck Series street race was the NASCAR Truck Series.

Yes, the regulars came prepared, and they fought it out lap after lap. It was an honest-to-god street race, and it was won in marvelous fashion by Layne Riggs, whom I used to not like, but that is now completely wiped away. He trained in the Ford Racing simulator with Joey Hand for months for this race, and it showed.

I am so, so happy to see how much the increased emphasis on road and street courses has up-skilled all three NASCAR fields.

The first race of Trans Am’s 60th anniversary season was a good race, just not at the front. Matthew Brabham led the whole thing despite multiple restarts. But elsewhere in the top five, there was a real race on. I was particularly impressed with the TA1 debut of Kaylee Bryson, who got dumped unceremoniously on the first lap and proceeded to drive through the pack. At the end, she was hounding Adam Andretti, fresh from his NASCAR Truck Series race at St. Petersburg, for the fourth spot. Bryson finished P5.

A moment of remembrance for Sandro Munari, a champion of Italian, European, and global rallying. He won the Monte Carlo Rally four times. He also won the freaking Targa Florio in a Ferrari 312. After hanging up the helmet, he was public relations director for Lamborghini, and he also became a driving instructor. What a life.

I wouldn’t go so far as to say I sympathize, but I understand Formula 1’s predicament with the Monaco Grand Prix. Now that F1 cars are the size of Suburbans, Monaco isn’t really a race anymore, it’s more of a parade that is sometimes interrupted by crashes or shuffled by bad pitstops.

Last year, they thought they could Mickey Mouse themselves a solution by requiring all cars to use three sets of tires — i.e. requiring them to stop twice — but as you may recall, midfield teams defeated this rule easily. They used one car to back up the pack so the other one could keep its track position in its pit stop. It sucked, and fortunately F1 realized that.

The 2026 cars are a little smaller, so maybe that will make a difference? They also won’t be suffering from the energy starvation they’ll have at tracks with long straights and few braking zones. That will create leeway to play with the rules around energy deployment, which could actually contribute to on-track passing.

The start of the 2026 Formula 1 season is sure to be chaotic to the point that Mercedes’ alleged exploitation of loopholes in the engine compression ratio regulations might not even matter at first. They might be so far ahead that the bump in horsepower doesn’t even account for it completely. They might be beaten so badly off the line by Ferrari’s low turbo lag that they can’t catch up.

Either way, the FIA has moved to end the saga that dominated preseason headlines by updating the testing regime to measure compression ratio at both cold and hot temperatures, and they’ve moved up the timeline for doing so to June 1.

The teams have unanimously approved the measure. Many of them said as the saga bubbled along that they didn’t care if it was decided one way or the other, they just wanted clarity on what was and was not legal. Now they’ll get it, and we’ll see if Mercedes can get their stuff into the window in time, but they seem to believe they can — if it was ever over the line in the first place.

I am sure we will never find out what the actual deal was between Formula 1 management and Michael Andretti. We know that Michael’s F1 career was a mess, and he probably pissed people off, and it may just be personal. Or it may just have conflicted with F1’s strategic goals to have a team called “Andretti” instead of landing an OEM, which may suck to race fans but make perfect sense to them. Either way, American racing is fortunate that Mario Andretti was able to find a way to remain involved in the project, because he was the 1978 Formula 1 world champion, and he deserves this level of legacy in the sport. Now, in a fitting gesture, Cadillac’s first F1 chassis is named after him.

As Palou has crushed the IndyCar field harder and harder with each passing year, McLaren’s breach-of-contract lawsuit with him has loomed over it like a cloud of shit.

I have little doubt that McLaren strung Palou along about an F1 seat that was never really his. It’s also clear that Palou and his circle flagrantly mismanaged his career at this point, and he only landed on his feet because of Chip Ganassi’s largesse — and being one of the best race car drivers in the world.

Regardless of any of this or how much it cost various parties, McLaren got to be the best Formula 1 team without Palou, and Ganassi got to be the best IndyCar team with him. McLaren’s IndyCar team could certainly use Palou’s services, but I’m sure they’ll figure things out eventually. It is water-under-the-bridge time as 2026 on-track action starts in, oh, 15 minutes as of this writing.

So they have managed to settle. Terms were not disclosed, but clearly one of them is that Palou has to say, “McLaren never misled me, they are a wonderful racing team, this was all my fault — and also there were bad, bad people around me who did not have my best interests at heart.” Even if McLaren did mislead him, it’s in his interest to get over it. That goes for everybody involved. Let’s go IndyCar racing.

Speaking of TCR’s problems, I am sort of counting on the British Touring Car Championship’s expansive new 2027 regulations to inspire a compelling alternative model for the future of touring car racing. Among other broadened permissions, the new rules will allow for the homologation of cars not sold in the UK, and that proviso has been brought forward to this year, allowing NAPA Racing UK to enter the saloon-based Ford Focus Titanium, rather than the hatchback version they ran before. It looks absolutely awesome.

He didn’t even have time to get a handle on his Formula Regional car this winter, and now former WRC star Kalle Rovanperä is testing his Super Formula car, and he’s two seconds off the pace. To be fair, multiple professional open-wheel drivers have horribly wrecked their Super Formula cars in Suzuka testing for this season, one of whom is no longer going to race Super Formula after all, and Rovanperä hasn’t done that yet. But the team around him is starting to make noises that sound like Kalle’s run at Formula 1 might be aborted if things don’t settle in soon.

Meanwhile, it’s about to be March, and we still have no idea how people outside of Japan are supposed to watch Super Formula this year.

Aston Martin F1’s works arrangement with Honda is shaping up to be the greatest “you had one job” of the hybrid era of Formula 1. How much more one-job could you get than to be a factory team whose ICE engine damages its battery?

Fernando Alonso’s life should be made into an opera. How can a driver have his career ruined so many times by one company’s engines and then agree to stay in Formula 1 until he’s 50 years old to run with them again?

There’s a new regulation set for the FIA World Rally Championship next year, and the cars are going to be leaner, meaner, and easier to tune on than the high-tech direction they tried to go with Rally1. Toyota is absolutely dominating right now, and so the question of what car they’ll bring to the party is of great interest. They’ve just tested one, and automotive journalists believe from its contours that we may have just caught our first glimpse of the return of the Celica.

I am still yet to watch what I would consider a gripping single-class TCR race (they are awesome in multi-class series like IMSA’s Michelin Pilot Challenge). The cars do not seem to be treated equally, and the grids are too small, and I’ve heard that’s because the regulation of the category can be arbitrary and controlling. None of that speaks of a healthy situation.

Still, we need TCR as a modern path forward for touring car racing, and the FIA championship, which is the highest level of TCR, doesn’t deserve to be jerked around like this. The season is two months away, and the promoter just asked the series to move the event two months later in the season, so the series just bagged it and are looking for a new venue for their opener. They say they’ll be back in Mexico City next year.

UPDATE 2/28: I did not think of the recent eruption of state-vs.-cartel violence around Mexico as an unstated reason why it might be good to move a race weekend back a little bit, but TouringCars.net did.

Tatiana Calderón is the only Latin American woman to have ever driven a Formula 1 car (as a development driver). She’s raced in F3 and F2, IndyCar, Super Formula, ELMS and WEC, and last year she drove the Mustang GT3 in IMSA for Gradient Racing before being dropped for presumably stupid business reasons. Obviously, she is a heck of a wheel-woman. And now she’s got a new full-season job.

She’s driving in Brazil’s Stock Car Pro Series. If you haven’t heard of it, that’s probably because you aren’t Brazilian. It’s a top-tier touring car road racing series that I would compare with Supercars in Australia. People like Rubens Barrichello, Felipe Massa, and Hélio Castroneves race in it. You can watch it on YouTube, and you definitely should.

Nowhere in my motorsports travels have I seen a wider gulf between old and new fans than IndyCar. The determined negativity of the old fans around me is exhausting. It makes it difficult for me to explain that I agree that conflicts of interest are holding back the sport in the Penske Entertainment era, because I also believe that Roger Penske single-handedly saved IndyCar by taking it over, and that there is literally no one on Earth who is more qualified to perform the smell test of whether something is or is not IndyCar.

Putting Doug Boles in charge of the series was the first sign of long-term internal harmony, to me. Doug is the guy responsible for the greatest motor race on Earth — the thing nobody around IndyCar will ever mess with — and putting the whole series under his purview is a powerful firewall. The thing is, he can’t directly handle everything both up in the suites and down on the track at the same time, so it’s important to watch how he organizes his troops.

Last year, regulation and officiating were the most obvious things to shore up, and spinning off an independent structure for that was a smart first step. Appointing overseers for it with NASCAR and FIA experience was a smart second step. Now, the issue is, the season is here, the actual officials on staff are essentially the same, and they’ve still been unable to hire a boss for them. But Raj Nair shrewdly went out in the midst of a bad news cycle and rattled off a lot of very specific observations about where the series is at with officiating, and that made me trust that they’re at least thinking correctly about what to do next.

I can’t blame NASCAR for trying to do its own Drive to Survive given how disproportionately well that worked for Formula 1, but this move shows that they’re finally having some production ideas of their own.

First of all, the idea of bedding in with Prime Video makes obvious sense given how well their run of Cup race broadcasts went last year, and I dare say that if Formula 1 can get away with bundling U.S. race broadcasts with Apple services, bundling NASCAR with Amazon Prime seems like an even better idea.

But moreover, NASCAR just doesn’t have the same juice for a dramatic year-long documentary as Formula 1 does: There are too many drivers and teams, and those don’t have enough global celebrity star power pressure on them to make for off-track jeopardy, which is what DtS fans are really watching for. As followers of Formula 1 racing knows, the actual motorsports part barely even factors into that show, and the race events are basically just montages in it. NASCAR is all about the races, and that made a DtS-style silly season show rather boring.

This idea of focusing on the Daytona 500 will not only make for a better show that is more worth watching alongside a racing season — rather than instead of one, as much DtS watching seems to be done — it will do exactly what NASCAR needs to do as a sport and raise the profile of the races themselves as the centerpiece. Hopefully they’re thinking about this in terms of which race to focus on next, rather than just what happens in the same setting year after year.

Given that Netflix is literally the reason Formula 1 is popular in the United States, I did wonder how the move to Apple TV for U.S. race broadcasts would affect Drive to Survive. I did not expect that it would result in the show also streaming on Apple TV, and let’s be real, that is an epic win for Apple. I am quite sure that Apple dropped a bag of money that blotted out the sun in front of Netflix HQ for it, but the other terms of the deal reveal how it went. Netflix asked to stream a live race in the U.S. time zone in exchange, and they got… the Canadian Grand Prix. That’s not to denigrate that race — love that race — but it has a little bit of a logistical hiccup for U.S. race fans.

Apple: “We’ll give you 💰 to let us show Drive to Survive”

Netflix: “Okay, but you have to give us a live race that’s during the day”

Apple: “K you can have the one that conflicts with the Indy 500”

Netflix: “N… no! We want a good one!”

Apple: “K bye”

Netflix: “OKAY FINE”

— Jon 🛞 (@jon.turningfortune.com) February 26, 2026 at 2:43 PM

Pirelli takes a lot of shit from the F1 world — mostly from fans — but I think it’s hard to argue that Isola did not do an incredible job making what are arguably the most important tires in the world. Given that tires are essentially the only strategic variable left in grand prix racing, Pirelli has delivered pretty consistently through some truly wild Formula 1 regulations, and now that the 2026 product has been delivered, it’s a new era, and it makes sense to hand over the reins to a guy who has been working there since 2008.

Yeah, they have some issues with wet-weather tires, but maybe now that the floor of an F1 car isn’t a gigantic water cannon, wets will be easier to get a handle on.

Formula E driver moves will be especially interesting this year as the Gen4 car arrives next year, and it appears to be the first electric race car that truly belongs in the FIA World Championship category alongside Formula 1. If everything goes according to plan, the pinnacle of open-wheel racing in 2027 will essentially offer the world’s best drivers a choice: hybrid or electric.

2023 Formula E champion Jake Dennis has been one of the biggest prospects, as he has been rumored to be considering leaving Andretti after a drop in form over the past couple seasons. He says he was weighing multiple serious offers, but he decided to stay with the team that gave him his rookie ride. To be fair, taking a glance around the motorsport world, I wouldn’t leave the TWG stable right now, either.