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.

Oh well. Maybe next year.

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

Rovanperä’s overall open-wheel trajectory has been sensible, but it has gone a little strangely. He got started in the well regarded Formula Regional Oceania championship over the winter, though he didn’t achieve many notable results, and he had to miss the final round due to — yes — illness. The plan was always then to enter Super Formula, but he has told reporters that this was the requirement of his minders at Toyota rather than his own initiative.

Super Formula is a very high-level series, of course — both Pierre Gasly and Liam Lawson had strong showings there prior to getting their Formula 1 rides, and Álex Palou did a turn there as well — but it’s certainly a bit more out-there of a choice for a Formula 1 aspirant than, say, Formula 2. It makes sense if you’re Toyota, though. But the latest development is the weirdest of all: The announcement of Rovanperä’s withdrawal was issued by Toyota chairman Akio Toyoda himself. It’s understandable that Toyota would take on Kalle’s career as a bit of a project given the prowess he showed in WRC, but one gets the impression that he is not entirely in control of his own destiny here.

Rovanperä’s winter testing in the Super Formula car was disrupted by issues that were reported as “vertigo,” but the vague statements imply that the current issue is a bit more significant than that. These developments have not been terribly well received by the race-viewing public, to the point that Rovanperä’s WRC stablemate, Takamoto Katsuta, felt the need to publicly defend him and continue to back him as a Formula 1 prospect.

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.