I don’t understand what’s not to get, honestly. He’s been there for all kinds of other new Audi works racing ventures. It would only make more sense if he’d been there all along.

There are also safety changes with energy deployment to help cars that are slow off the line to accelerate quicker, as well as caps to boost during races that will mitigate the kinds of dangerous closing speeds we’ve seen (and which drivers were warning everyone about since the earliest, vaguest dream of these regulations). The patterns of lights on the rear of cars to indicate what the car is doing have also been clarified.

All of this will help, and it’s a cool quality of all this added influence of electric drive and braking that it can be adjusted so precisely as more data is gathered about the racing. Combined with the teams getting to work way harder on development than they were expecting to when the season started, it’s going to be fascinating to see what happens in Miami after this long break is over.

Antonio Giovinazzi put the #51 Ferrari on pole in the closest Hyperpole session in the championship’s history, and then there was a race at the front from lights to flag. It was won by the #8 Toyota of Brendon Hartley, Ryo Hirakawa and Sebastien Buemi, giving the once-dominant marque its 50th WEC victory. Ferrari can be beaten, and it will be a fun fight to watch.

In LMGT3, a WRT BMW won (shocker), but it shouldn’t have. Garage 59’s step up to WEC almost began in glorious fashion. The McLaren snatched pole and led late into the race before conking out with an alternator issue. I expect them to get much more airtime this year.

Pin was supported at track by both Kimi Antonelli and George Russell. It sounds like the whole team is supports her all the time, really. If you haven’t seen or heard her recent episode of F1 Beyond the Grid, make sure to do so. She’s got all the makings of someone who is going to make it.

This connects with a rumor that Mike Conway will leave Toyota to join the Ford Hypercar program, so Estre would be filling that seat. There’s a lot bubbling under the surface for Toyota drivers, with growing influence over Haas F1, a new GT3 car coming soon, lots of pieces to move around.

The big moves during the surprise war-induced spring break are the promotion of Ben Waterhouse to chief performance and design engineer (formerly head of performance engineering, God, F1 job titles are dumb) and the relocation of Andrea Landi, formerly deputy technical director at Racing Bulls, to the A team as head of performance.

Surely, everyone at Racing Bulls understands that providing talent to Red Bull Racing is the entire point of their organization, and no one will be mad at Laurent Mekies for poaching their guy as he himself was poached only a year ago. What’s interesting about this poaching — I mean, uh, promotion — is that Landi was the guy in charge of car development at Racing Bulls.

Remember, the car story last year was that the Red Bull was a nightmare as always — in the way Max likes — and the VCARB was one of the most benign cars on the grid, enabling the team to snatch podiums and stuff, giving Isack Hadjar the results he needed to get moved up to Red Bull after just one year. Perhaps it is time for Red Bull to make race cars that are nice to drive, especially now that GP and possibly even Max are leaving.

Drudi drives the Vantage GT3 in both WEC and GTWC Europe, but his outing in the Valkyrie in last year’s WEC Bahrain rookie test apparently went well, and now he’s going to be the guy waiting by the Batphone.

As usual in the ELMS, there are a lot of well known young hopefuls trying to stand out, and a few of them did. Doriane Pin — much to her fans’ delight — returned to sports cars, and she, Richard Verschoor, and Giorgio Roda ran up front all race long and landed on the LMP2 ProAm class podium for Duqueine Team. Jamie Chadwick, still stuck in ELMS while her coworkers go on to warm up her Genesis Hypercar seat for her, finished fourth outright for IDEC Sport with Laurents Hörr and Valerio Rinicella.

The big bummer of the race, I’m sorry to say, was the fate of Jack Doohan. This was his first race since all that messy Super Formula stuff fell through, and when he got in, he brought the car into the top five and briefly led the race. The fight was on for second place all the way to the end, but after light contact making the pass for P2, something went wrong with the right rear with one minute to go, and Jack limped across the line in sixth. The team got a 10-second penalty post-race for speeding under full-course yellow, demoting them to P7.

Chin up, Jack. There’s more racing to go.

But suddenly the Indian sports minister is saying to the media, “There will be an F1 race in India in 2027. This is 100% happening,” despite the fact that it is 100% not happening. It turns out that he simply had a meeting with some FIA member person, who obviously has no say whatsoever about where F1 races. F1 has had to respond — gently, but firmly. To whatever extent there actually are any plans to bring back the Indian Grand Prix, doesn’t this sort of thing hurt the case?

Andretti Global never actually committed to running its fourth car this year, as Marco has hung up his helmet, but it was widely understood that they were keeping it warm for Colton should he be available, which he was supposed to be. Now that he isn’t, Andretti has decided to concentrate on its full-season entries.

The last car standing was the Toyota of Taka Katsuta, so that’s two in a row for him. We love that for Taka. But don’t let that obscure the fact that Hyundai is getting its act together.

UPDATE 4/21: As friend of the site @putdorianedown.bsky.social reminds me, there are actually technically four OEMs in the current LMP2 regulations, but everyone stopped using the non-ORECAs, so it’s a de facto one-make category. Hopefully this 2028 process will be a bit more competitive.

This category is well established around the world in its current form. It’s at the perfect intersection of being a stepping stone to the top level for both teams and drivers, a competitive place for pros piecing a season together to get more seat time, and at least somewhat insulated from the rich and untalented by LMP3. Now is a great time to push it forward.

Oh well. Maybe next year.

Most of the talk in F1 right now is, of course, about whether Max Verstappen himself will leave not just Red Bull but the sport entirely, and this can’t be unrelated to that. GP will have a broad mandate at McLaren, and the title of Chief Racing Officer, while reporting to Andrea Stella, which many see as the beginnings of a medium-term succession plan, but why wouldn’t GP prefer one of those at Red Bull? Ominous.

I hope Lance has a great time. I am so here for stressed out F1 drivers teaching the world about the joys of sports car racing.

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

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.

Anyway, the car will make its racing debut at the FIA WEC season opener, the 6 Hours of Imola, from April 17–19.

• 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.

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.

One wonders why this was kept under wraps instead of being loudly communicated, especially during F1’s whole “ahead at the apex” Max Verstappen dive-bombing era of the past couple years. Those controversies frequently ignited discourses about officiating standards and stewarding experience and that sort of thing. You’d think the FIA would have wanted to get out ahead of that by crowing about this upcoming program. It might even have headed off that shouty letter from Formula E drivers last week.

The level of energy deployment necessary for a good race on a proper road course is made possible by Formula E’s still relatively new Pit Boost fast-charging, which I think is one of the most underrated technical developments in racing recently. Not only does it reduce the amount of in-race management, increase the strategic options, and create great mid-race jeopardy, this level of fast-charging seems among the most likely of all current technologies in motorsports to have massive consumer benefits.

After issuing a terse non-denial yesterday that was enough for me to decide the story was at least half-true, Audi today announced a new management structure in which Jonathan Wheatley is leaving effective immediately for “personal reasons” and Mattia Binotto will add team principal — a job at which he performed not-excellently at Ferrari before joining this team — to his list of titles. There has been additional reporting to suggest Binotto and Wheatley didn’t get along, which I guess is obvious given what’s happening. Again, this sucks for Audi.

Not to be outdone, Lawrence Stroll released a goofball statement as an Aston Martin press release where he “set[s] the record straight” that Adrian Newey is his “partner and an important shareholder,” and that he’s not going anywhere, which we knew. Stroll reminds us that Aston does not adhere to “traditional” conceptions of the role of team principal (again, we know), but all this chaos and ambiguity is apparently “by design.” Then he drops the real banger, which I will quote in full:

“We are regularly approached by senior executives of other teams who wish to join Aston Martin Aramco, but in keeping with our policy, we do not comment on rumour and speculation.”

Absolutely hilarious framing. It’s not out of the question that this is all Wheatley’s idea, but what is out of the question is that Wheatley would quit his job running the Audi F1 team if his next move weren’t a done deal, so for Stroll to make it sound like people are beating down the door is silly. I did see a report that Stroll took another meeting with Christian Horner this week, but at this point I’m starting to think that’s all Stroll trying to recruit him, and he’s saying no. Never mind the fact that, to all appearances, Newey hates Horner.

Anyway, can’t wait to see how this one lands. Another enticing tidbit is that Mercedes has — magically, coincidentally, just today — promoted Bradley Lord to deputy team principal and Toto Wolff’s formal number two. I’m sure that has nothing to do with TP vacancies suddenly appearing at any brand new F1 teams.

Original post, March 19, 2:09 PM:

There is nothing surprising about Adrian Newey stepping down as big-picture boss after four months on the job. I think the Formula 1 world was too polite about that appointment. Newey is renowned for wanting to be left alone by businesspeople to concentrate on hand-drawing aerodynamic diagrams. He doesn’t want any part of the big picture. On the other hand, Aston Martin’s actual race car is such a dumpster fire that perhaps there was no one else in the organization who knew enough about race cars to fix it. There probably still isn’t.

What’s surprising is that Jonathan Wheatley is leaving Audi to do the job. The speculation is that Newey recommended Wheatley to Lawrence Stroll himself, and that makes sense. Wheatley is the man, and Stroll seemingly does not care how much of his fortune is left at the end of his time in racing. But this sucks for Audi. They are just getting their legs under them, and Wheatley seemed to be central to the project.

The letter is, well, sweeping. It criticizes the stewarding, the race direction, the rules, and even the leadership’s understanding of what the racing product is. They want an overhaul that puts people who understand Formula E racing specifically in charge, as well as better feedback and decision-making mechanisms.

And, like, fair enough. But it doesn’t seem like team management had much of a view into this move, and drivers going rogue doesn’t seem like the most likely route to professionalizing the series. What it’s gotten them so far is another round of “Formula E is a shit show” headlines.

(Unfortunately, Bob Constanduros on the PA tried to ruin the greatest moment of Kimi’s life by announcing him as “Kimi Raikkonen”.)

This is a guess, but I’m guessing we saw teams take a bit more risk in round 2, and the increase in problems was the consequence. You just want to have a complete weekend at round 1 of a new car, and Melbourne was a particularly extreme track to start with due to its energy demands. With a little more confidence in China, teams f’d around more, and they consequently found out more.

Obviously the trophy for worst weekend goes to McLaren. Oscar Piastri hasn’t gotten a single lap in a grand prix after two of them, and this time, defending world champion Lando Norris didn’t get any, either.

Aston Martin promises they’re making behind-the-scenes progress, but we’re still getting onboard video of Fernando Alonso taking his hands off the wheel to try to shake life back into them.

Williams’ car is a total mess, which is hugely disappointing given how much they hyped up their own 2026 program, but Carlos Sainz did bag a couple points in the race.

Clearly the most famously bad weekend is that of Red Bull, even though it masks the fact that Isack Hadjar picked up four points for P8, and Liam Lawson beat him in the Racing Bulls. Max Verstappen had to retire the car with 11 laps to go, and now he hates the car and the sport and you and me and everyone.

Cadillac also showed more growing pains this weekend — including Checo crashing into Valtteri slightly on lap 1, for which he apologized — but they both finished the race, so we’ll take that!

Also highly worth mentioning is the fifth place performance of Ollie Bearman and Haas. Alpine is also apparently back in the game. Both cars finished in the points, Colapinto in P10 and Gasly in P6. Haas and Alpine — power unit customers of Ferrari and Mercedes, respectively — are the examples of customer teams who seem to have gotten it right this year.

Which brings us to Ferrari! Recall that Lewis’ only meaningful achievement in his debut season with Ferrari last year was winning the China sprint race. Well, this year in China, he finally stood on the podium of a grand prix again, and it was a seriously lovely moment with Kimi, Bono, and Lewis all up there together. George Russell was also present.

Yes, Mercedes obviously has a power advantage, but it’s no longer clear that they’re going to keep that advantage over Ferrari for long. In both grands prix and the Shanghai sprint, both Ferraris have troubled Mercedes, and while George and Kimi certainly seem happy to be driving the fastest car, both Lewis and Charles report that they’re having a blast driving the Ferrari, which is what it should be like to drive Ferraris, don’t you think?

Shanghai — in my view the most consistently underrated track on the F1 calendar — demonstrates more of what F1 cars can do than Melbourne did, and that also means the cars spend less time doing any particular thing, so there were no meaningful energy starvation problems, and everybody seemed to have plenty of juice to make dicey racing moves. I really do recommend watching both the sprint and the grand prix. Formula 1 racing is really fun again, I can’t wait for more, and it really sucks that we’re losing two races this spring due to the tragic stupidity of warfare.

From a results perspective, it was gripping, with the lead swinging back and forth from stage to stage, eventually ending up in the hands of Takamoto Katsuta, his long-awaited first win in WRC. Everybody liked that (even though it was still a Toyota ass-whooping).

But the course was a real mess. Many tires were destroyed, many corners were destroyed by destroyed tires, whole suspensions were destroyed, whole teams had all their engines overheat because of intakes clogged with mud… and that was on the stages that weren’t canceled for being too treacherous!

Don’t get me wrong, it was a great watch, but I would not be pleased if I were a WRC team’s comptroller.

There are high-level discussions going on about the future of the event; they weren’t triggered by the craziness of this year’s rally, but that couldn’t be helping. This will be the last year the event has direct government involvement, and organizers and the series are trying to hash out what its future will look like. I hope they come up with something.

I have said my piece on the overall significance of this war as pertains to motorsports, so let’s just concentrate on the specifics of each development. There is a possibility that this unexpected break early in the season could ultimately benefit the season. The new regulations and the cars they have produced — objectively awesome though they are — need a lot of work, and this will buy everyone time. The financial hits from lost race revenue are considerable, but they aren’t game-changing, and some of the savings teams will get running two fewer races might well be.

It’s just such a tragedy that this planet is so frequently prevented from being peaceful.

Lots of people rushed to predict that moving onto a streaming service would tank Formula 1’s ratings in the U.S., but I don’t think those people quite appreciate how many people there already are in Apple’s ecosystem — and how good of new Formula 1 fans those people make. I expect the move to Apple TV to dramatically accelerate Formula 1’s popularity here, and I expect people who have gripes about it to get over it.

And don’t forget the absurd race track! Get a load of turn 10, a.k.a. “Valdebebas.”

Reporters asked BMW M CEO Frank van Meel if he’s thought about going back to Formula 1 now that Audi and Cadillac are in and Mercedes is wiping the floor with everybody. He said, “The answer is no,” arguing that, despite the obvious marketing benefits, there wouldn’t be enough relevant technology transfer to their consumer vehicles.

That’s quite a take considering that BMW M is still working very hard on its hybrid LMDh car in top-level endurance racing. Van Meel says that one is plenty road-relevant. He also, though, “think[s] this year is going to be the first one in Formula One that there’s a hybrid system,” though, so don’t assume the guy knows what he’s talking about. (Formula 1’s first year with a hybrid power unit was 2014.)

The rules on energy harvesting and deployment are among the first FIA documents to come out each race week, and they contain a few stats that make the rationale clear. One is the “power-limited distance,” meaning the amount of the lap where the cars are accelerating or at top speed and deploying electrical energy. Shanghai’s is 0.4km less than Melbourne’s despite the circuit being 0.18km longer. Drivers are on the brakes more — and harder — throughout the lap. Correspondingly, all of the recharge and deployment limits, both for qualifying and the race, are significantly more generous.

Of course, I, like many others, expected it was just an experiment, and sure enough it did not appear in Australia, but here it is. The plan is to run it in practice and then make the decision about whether to qualify for the Sprint with it.

Bring it on. I hope they crank up the competition in motorsports as much as they are in making good road cars that people actually want and can afford.

But the next layer of the objection always seems to be that this is about marketing rather than racing, and usually they cite as evidence the fact that Formula 4 cars are not the best or most challenging race cars in the world. Well, I would like to invite such critics to race one against these women. Now that we’re enough years in for F1 Academy graduates to start forging grown-up racing careers, one after another is revealing that she is not aspiring to be an Instagram influencer but rather a racing driver.

This is the greatest such story yet, to my eye. Lia Block is doing a full American Rally Association season in a Hyundai i20 N Rally2 car, and she’s making quite clear that her ambition is to contest the FIA World Rally Championship. Her father, of course, was Ken Block, so it runs in the family. To lose your father in an off-road vehicle crash and stay on your path towards being a professional driver is no small or simple thing. She knows exactly what she’s getting into, and she intends to do it at the highest level.

I tend to use a pretty simple heuristic: Was it interesting, yes or no? In fairness, I have almost never watched a race car in motion and not found it interesting, but there are, of course, levels to this. I would put the 2026 Formula 1 Australian Grand Prix near the highest end of the highest level.

Oh, one car is way faster than the others and won the race 1-2? How interesting! They must have done a very good job at working around the loopholes in this exceedingly complicated regulation set and built the best race car possible under the circumstances! I wonder what the championship fight between the two Mercedes drivers will be like, and if any of the three other teams with the same engine or Ferraris that embarrassed them off the line at the start might have something to say about it!

Oh, a bunch of cars had serious technical problems? How interesting! As a motor racing enthusiast, I wonder if there are 1,001 or so fascinating technical stories there!

Oh, Oscar Piastri destroyed his car on the recon lap to the grid by getting on the power with his right wheels over the curb? How interesting! I wonder if there will be more mistakes that add drama to the season this year!

Oh, there was a race at the front for the first like 15 laps instead of it being over by turn 3? How interesting! I wonder if the fluctuations in energy available for overtake boosts from lap to lap had anything to do with that!

Oh, Ferrari chose to stay out when most people chose to pit under an early virtual safety car, and for some reason they aren’t apologizing afterwards? How interesting! The fan narrative that “Ferrari is bad at race strategy” might not completely explain the decision-making at the team that beat everyone else except the team with the head-and-shoulders fastest car!

Oh, Fernando Alonso had the Aston Martin in the points for a period of time despite the car being a deathtrap shitbox, Cadillac finished its first Formula 1 race ever, and Gabi Bortoleto got Audi points on debut? How interesting!

Oh, Arvid Lindblad, the season’s only rookie, finished EIGHTH? How interesting!

Oh, Max Verstappen and Lando Norris, the dominant drivers of the 2022–2025 ground effect cars, hate the new cars, but Lewis Hamilton, the most successful Formula 1 driver of all time, loves them and thinks they’re “really fun”? How interesting!

Oh, HALF A MILLION PEOPLE went to a motor race this weekend? HOW INTERESTING!

Like, come on. Yes, there are some wrinkles to smooth out after race 1 of year 1 of a completely different car. No, nobody completely understands what the optimal way to use the battery is. Yes, it is possible that some changes to the ICE/electric balance of energy output might help. So, let us sally forth into the Formula 1 season and do those things. If you’re not entertained, I dare say that’s your choice.

Do you like the new cars? That’s a different matter. Personally, I do. I think powerful electric boost and active aero for efficiency is a very interesting combination. There are some things I’d like changed, but they’re all regulatory matters.

I don’t mind the howling turbo spooling long start procedure, but I think they should be allowed to use the instantaneous power delivery of the electric motor to get off the line. Rather than have them clobber each other at the start like Franco Colapinto nearly did to Liam Lawson, have them launch hard into lap 1 with very different energy levels and race it out.

Have a qualifying mode that turns up the ICE fuel flow level or something to make the split less than 50/50. Do I care whether that power goes to the wheels or the battery? No, I just want to make sure they’re making the car go as fast as possible in every part of the track when they don’t have to save tires or race people.

That’s about it, really. The cars are clearly better for racing than before, they look and sound incredible, and personally I am more interested in acceleration than top speed or overall lap time. I go into this season as excited as ever before because even if it’s status quo, it will be better, and it won’t be. There will be massive surprises.

I am, of course, mainly watching Formula 2 this year to see Colton Herta, and though he crashed in practice and did not amaze in qualifying or in race results, I think he did fine. In the sprint race he was aggressive and opportunistic, testing and learning the limits of the car and making some mistakes without causing any meaningful problems. In the feature, he drove more conservatively and made good choices, finishing in P7. Herta was, it should be noted, handily beaten by his Hitech teammate, Ritomo Miyata, who is the most interesting matchup with Herta on the grid in terms of prior open-wheel success.

The tenth season of Formula 2 is off to a good start. The broadcast mentioned that Lando Norris is the first F2 graduate to become F1 world champion, which blows my mind.

In Melbourne, it looks like teams are settling on a big super-clip (full blast of battery recharge with full throttle while slowing) into turn 9 as the bit of track they have to sacrifice in order to accelerate with full power on the next straight and make it to the other side. It’s the sort of thing purists were worried about, and I’ve seen some complain about how it looks through practice, but as Juan Pablo Montoya reported trackside on the broadcast, the acceleration after that is mighty impressive. I’ll withhold an opinion on whether that’s worth it and say we’ll find out in qualifying.

In general, every team and every driver looks to be where I’d expect them to be at this point with the exception of Aston Martin, which we knew was in trouble before the circus got to Australia, but things seem to really be crumbling now. A blame game has started (Newey is pinning it all on Honda, of course), the engine is shaking the hybrid system to bits, the drivers’ health is at risk from the vibrations, and it looks likely they may retire by choice before much of the race is even complete.

It’s not all Honda’s fault, of course; Aston sounds like they were taken by surprise by the total brain-drain of Honda people who worked on the Red Bull program, even though this is how Honda has always worked. Arguably it’s why Honda’s F1 history is so messy, too, and it’s repeating itself here, and Aston Martin was not ready for it.

Honda sends people to F1 to train and bring that wisdom to other parts of the company. This is also Toyota’s approach to Formula 1, but that’s why their arrangement with Haas is so carefully constrained, and it doesn’t even include the power unit, which is provided to Haas by Ferrari. Haas, meanwhile, is putting in top 10 times in practice. Aston Martin is hardly putting up any times at all, and Lance Stroll’s fastest one so far is on trend to be outside the 107% window to qualify!

The other Ferrari customer team, Cadillac, is having more problems as we get into the real race weekend, and that should surprise no one. I was surprised things were going so well before. But nothing has happened that suggests any sort of doom. I sure would love to see both cars finish the race, though. “We’re not last” is as ambitious a first race as I could ever demand of them.

Ferrari itself is looking great, as expected after testing. Lewis is happy and actively exploring the car and the energy deployment system, and Charles was fastest of all in FP1. Both drivers’ lap times on every team are close — except on cars with issues, like that of Lando Norris — and that’s not surprising; they’re still heavily in testing mode. Mercedes seems to have turned up the wick for FP2, which put at least Piastri’s McLaren into the mix. Verstappen went off and made a bit of a mess of his car, but by and large the Red Bull power unit is humming along. Arvid Lindblad put up a P5 time in his first FP1 session as a Formula 1 driver.

Again, we’ll see how qualifying looks. I have seen enough to believe these cars can race, but qualifying is where energy starvation will make the difference between a field that makes sense and one that does not. Now, that might be fun. But it might be a mess.

This year, we’ll see their LMDh hypercar on track ahead of its racing debut next year, and McLaren execs are doing some press about how they’re justifying this effort. They’re calling it Project Endurance. They’re going to make and sell track-only consumer versions and host driving events with them, that sort of thing. Obviously this is for the mega-elite — McLaren’s GT cars were already very high-end, and this is going up-market — but maybe it’s also the kind of thing that convinces the mega-elite to stay invested in motorsports.

Their boss (trackside engineering manager) will be Grant Clarke, who was chief engineer of the NEOM McLaren Formula E team in 2024 and at TF Sport in WEC for four years before that.

Motor racing is one of those things. Yes, I know that fascist dictators throughout modern history have loved motor racing, too, but you know what? They lost. The periods of world war that canceled international motor racing sucked, and when they were over, societies rushed to turn their airfields into race tracks and turn the race car factories that turned into bomber factories back into race car factories. And nowadays, racing is so big, high tech, and inextricably international that I am not exaggerating when I say that I believe it could hold the world together as it tries to fall apart.

I honestly do.

So. One thing we know about Formula 1 racing is that it has lately and not-subtly become a plaything of the oil barons of the Middle East. All of the political neutrality touted by windbags at regulatory bodies can’t change the fact that the entities controlling Formula 1 — including the American company that owns it — are most definitely on A Side. I see people complain about this every day, and I get it.

But now look what’s happening.

I don’t think it’s a stretch to say that the governments of the United States and Israel are prioritizing things other than motorsports in their decision to decapitate the Iranian regime and kick off a whole conflagration that exceeds their most troubled nightmares. And their actions are now beginning to interrupt the activities of an American-owned publicly traded company that operates a sport with hundreds of millions of fans worldwide — including millions of Americans who are just getting to the party — that puts on three massive events in America, that has an exclusive broadcast deal with an American technology company that is one of the most profitable and powerful entities in the entire world (that being Apple), and whose Gulf State owners and financiers (and fuel providers) are getting actively bombed as payback for these strikes.

Which side of that do you think Formula 1 is on? Even if there are people in Formula 1 who are consciously on the other side ideologically, it is indisputable that the interest of the massive planetary industrial enterprise that is motor racing is for big international wars not to happen.

So I stand on the side of motor racing. It’s a much better use of international industry, technology, real estate, commerce, and oil refineries than warfare.

UPDATE Mar 3, 2026, 2:16 PM: The FIA World Endurance Championship has postponed its opening round, the Qatar 1812km, due to the violence in the region. The first WEC round will now be at Imola from April 17–19, and the plan is to run Qatar later in the year.

So far, the Peugeot 9X8 has been the only hypercar about which moves are being made, and don’t get me wrong, that’s a badass race car. But the Ferrari wears the crown.

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.

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 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.

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?

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.

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

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.

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.

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Previous generations of Formula E rules have only allowed completely new homologations for mid-rule-cycle Evo updates to the whole platform. Now, instead, the series will give each team allotments of development tokens for specific systems that they can deploy as needed for joker upgrades. This is not only less expensive than having to develop and homologate whole new cars while suffering with the flaws of the current one until the Evo, it means teams will be bringing different updates at different times, which will inject some surprise into the field.

As for Cadillac, not spreading the 31 too thin is obviously a great call. Wayne Taylor is obviously behind AXR in IMSA, Wayne wants to win Le Mans with his boys, that’s fine, but more importantly, JOTA is clearly ready to do it. Concentrating all the 31’s firepower on IMSA gives them the best possible chance of toppling Penske and Porsche.

So I think Cadillac F1 has earned the right to be believed when it gives projections of its progress, and TWG Motorsports CEO Dan Towriss says the GM power unit is still on schedule for its initial goal of 2029, and he’s even making noise about doing it sooner if possible.

On the other hand, I am supportive of opening up a slot on the calendar for a new race in Asia or Africa, or perhaps another rotation between such places. Formula 1 should certainly make every effort to live up to its title of world championship.

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I would be sad about this, but Renault just seems to suck too much at management of motorsports programs, so I’ll get over their absence.

The problem is, he absolutely hated doing it. He was miserable. He called it “anti-racing.” He also called it “Formula E on steroids,” which sounds amazing, but clearly he meant it disparagingly. He doesn’t think driving a Formula 1 car should involve this much systems management. Lando Norris, who is the reigning Formula 1 world champion, later gave a rather champion-ly rebuttal, saying he’s perfectly willing to deal with the new car given that he gets to be a Formula 1 driver for a living.

Look, I want Max to quit and go sports car racing — and I’m sure Lando does, too — so we’re obviously biased, but I’m actually glad Max is unhappy. There tends to be an inverse correlation between how much fun drivers are having and how much fun it is to watch them.

The problem is that drivers now have to rev for around 10 seconds in order to spool up the turbo to prevent lag on the getaway, since they no longer have an MGU-H to spin it up. But they also have to avoid over-charging their batteries while doing that, in addition to managing heat, dropping the clutch cleanly, and all the other usual difficulties of standing starts. Drivers are reportedly messing up one in 20 of their practice starts, which means that statistically someone will do it in a race every time. That’s not just a competitive problem; that’s a safety issue.

The thing is, there are rules changes that could mitigate the problem. I think the most promising would be allowing some battery energy deployment on the start to compensate for turbo lag, which is currently not allowed, but what the heck are electric car motors for if not accelerating!? A less invasive change would be increasing the time between the cars parking in formation and the start lights coming on. Ferrari, mysteriously, is blocking the rules changes, which suggests they’ve got a good PU solution to the turbo lag issue, and that’s fair enough, but we can’t be having crashes on the start in every race.

As it turns out, the 2026 Aston Martin has been an absolute handful in testing, and a slow one at that. Sure, I half-believe the kinds of things the team says about starting off behind but having a powerful development pipeline in place. I believe Adrian Newey knows how to do those kinds of things. But I think this team might just be fundamentally dysfunctional.

And you know what? If Mercedes didn’t figure out what it was going to do in case it got caught, that’s their own fault, much as the other PU manufacturers not figuring out how to do this was their own fault. And the regulatory mess is the FIA’s own fault! This is automobile racing in its purest form.

The arrangement is a little bit shady now, but I think it could stand to be legitimized. IndyCar severely limits testing — just like Formula 1 does — to keep the cost of competition at a level that is manageable for small teams; otherwise, the teams with the most money could do the most testing and maintain an unsurpassable advantage as was essentially the case in bygone eras. However, Formula 1 provides a formal way for teams to run Testing of Previous Cars (TPC) programs running cars that have aged out of present-day specifications, and customer teams without old cars of their own can even borrow them from their works team, as Cadillac did before its first season.

IndyCar could conceivably allow this formally with cars like the Panoz. It also remains to be seen what will happen to all the DW12s in a couple years when the new IndyCar finally arrives. There is a balance to be struck between ensuring drivers have enough relevant seat time to be in fighting shape and keeping teams on a level playing field for testing current-spec race cars.

To me, this is an indication that Formula 1 remains emphatically Formula 1, and all is well in the world. I’m looking forward to seeing Kimi on track.

Hynes is rather well qualified for this position, having been a competitive open-wheel driver himself before moving behind the scenes to cultivate young, promising drivers such as one Lewis Hamilton.

I think the driver program is one of the most interesting parts of Cadillac F1 to watch. There have been so many attempts at cracking the code of making an American driver successful, and executives running the Cadillac project have not been quiet about having that ambition. Colton Herta is, of course, now explicitly waiting in the wings to be that driver, but his success is hardly guaranteed, and his window of time is small. So where will Cadillac concentrate its driver development efforts? How will it balance its novel marketing objectives with the traditional requirements? Hiring Marc Hynes is an indication that they intend to do it correctly, whether or not that means doing anything differently.

No, but seriously, there are much worse F1 teams to be benched by than Red Bull. Not only does Yuki get to drive such cool cars — a perk that will be massively upgraded this year with the Ford tie-up — he gets to be in front of crowds of F1 fans in key markets, staying relevant.

Cadillac F1 is fully launched now, having announced itself and its car livery to the American public during the Super Bowl last night. The ad is fantastic, keeping to the Apollo Progam theme team principal Graeme Lowdon has talked about a lot over the past year. The livery, putting my fears to rest, is very cool, too, although at least from Bahrain track photos it looks like the highly Cadillac-vibed chrome details in the ad were a lie.

The launch of the ad itself might get a little scuffed up by a lawsuit from Hollywood director Michael Bay, who claims Cadillac stole his ideas for the ad, but TWG doesn’t seem afraid of sprinkling a little money on such problems.

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Everything we’ve seen from Cadillac F1 so far has this nice, understated, black/white/silver thing going, but their test livery did not suggest impeccable taste. Are they going to sully the car with neon booger green? Will Cadillac be the new Kick Sauber?

This isn’t the federation’s first move of this kind, though; last year it took ownership of the FIA World Rallycross Championship, too. Now, it has enlisted the World Rally Championship promoter group to help with that, and they’re getting close to finding a new commercial rights holder for WRC that may take rallycross over as well. Maybe the truck racing thing is a similar sort of transitional stewardship arrangement. But if not, and the Ben Sulayem administration is trying to diversify its revenue streams away from Formula 1 dependency by getting commercially involved in racing, it’s surely going to run back into the legal trouble that explains why, for example, Formula 1’s commercial rights are held independently from its sanctioning rights.

While I’m glad Jack found a way to stay in the paddock, it really sucks that he’s not racing this year.

It sounds like it’s a little more complicated than, “He crashed three times in the same corner in testing, so we booted him,” but it’s surely not not about that. There is a European-style/Japanese-style engineering culture clash in Super Formula, and the visiting drivers do not always get their way, setup-wise. Whether that’s actually what led to Jack getting the boot from Kondo Racing or it’s what the Doohan Camp told journalists as an excuse for him crashing three times, hopefully this Haas job will be a more comfortable place for Jack to gather himself.

Also worthy of note was Porsche driver Nico Müller, who took his first pole position in Formula E.

I know this is verging on caring about testing lap times, but you should read the quotes in the article, too. Lewis sounds like he’s waking up from a bad dream.

Clearly the Alpine Formula 1 team is also a concern, as they have fallen to worst on the grid, and Renault will no longer even make them an engine. When Hornerpalooza kicks off, I fully expect the team to change brands.

Given how long the Acura ARX-06 has been in service in IMSA, it is natural to wonder why it hasn’t entered the WEC yet, and I look forward to learning more about that if possible, but as friend-of-TF @putdorianedown.bsky.social points out, there are many pieces of such a project that are just now falling into place:

This has been a story repeatedly, of course, but this one seems a lot more solid: - it gives a year, 2027 - there's space, because of Porsche - it names a credible partner team, Inter Europol

So, Great Honda Bake-Off for Le Mans (and the rest of the season) suddenly very plausible.

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— The Pin is mightier than the sword (@putdorianedown.bsky.social) Jan 30, 2026 at 9:34 AM

UPDATE FEB 20: More nightmare stories added from later in testing.

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.

Speaking of fun, Ye Yifei was definitely having it in Daytona. We spoke to him the day before the race:

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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 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.

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?

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.

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.

To me, these designs reveal a lot about the power dynamics. Jim Farley has obviously given Ford Racing a lot of power at the company. It’s involved in every category on Earth, it got a new brand that makes it more separate from road cars this year, and that brand has an official shade of blue that is utterly unrelated to that of the blue oval on the hood of the car. That’s power. And yet, look at what happened in the Formula 1 deal. It’s like Red Bull said, “Look, we’ll use your blue for the shirt, so that way when your WEC drivers take a picture with Max, it’ll look nice. But do not touch the car.”

This resulted in the nicest looking Red Bull F1 car in a long time. I might even call it a definitive livery; it spans the team’s history. And I think the innards of the car reflect a similar dynamic to what’s happening on a business level. Red Bull did not just become a Ford factory team. Ford became a service provider to the Red Bull factory team.

Adami is a storied figure in the F1 paddock, but I think it’s been pretty clear for a while that this car needs a new engineer. He and Carlos Sainz had some painful moments, too, though obviously they also had a lot of success once they got used to each other and the car. The difference is, Lewis doesn’t have that kind of time — and, really, Ferrari doesn’t, either. This looks just as bad for the team as it does for Hamilton.

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All right, it would be negligent not to point out that Citroën is much closer to a rebrand than a new team that should be getting all warm and fuzzy about out-of-the-gate success, and in fact it might be argued the team had some unfair advantages getting going, but come on, this is a glorious win no matter how you slice it.

Dan Ticktum, though — as is his wont — had a miserable time.