Motorsports Racing News & Blog Articles

Bike racer Juan Sebastián Castro was found dead in the rural town of Cimitarra, Santander, while competing in the fourth round of the Campeonato Colombiano de Rally Raid Darién (Colombian Darién Rally Raid Championship) on Saturday. He was thirty years old.

Castro disappeared in the middle of Saturday’s stage with his tracker last registering him as crossing a bridge dubbed “Bridge #7” on the way to Platanillo. Race organisers put out a missing persons notice with a reward of two million pesos for those able to find him, but his body was subsequently discovered next to a ravine.

A cause of death was not immediately confirmed, though authorities have suggested he succumbed to heat stroke.

Castro was competing on his Honda CRF 250 bike, one of nine riders in the 300 category. The stage on Saturday was the first of two for the weekend after a Prologue took place on Friday.

“The Darién Rally community, with deep regret, confirms the death of our competitor Juan Sebastian Castro due to apparent heat stroke, during the fourth round of the Rally Raid held in Cimitarra, Santander,” reads a statement from race officials. “We are immensely grateful to the Municipality’s Mayor’s Office, represented by Dr. Omar Galvis, who was in charge of convening the search teams of the Municipal Firefighters, National Police, National Army, the Cattlemen’s Association, and the community of Cimitarra. In addition, we are extremely thankful for all the search and rescue efforts carried out by the competitors participating in the event, our logistics staff, and the Darién community for all their support, their voice of solidarity, brotherhood, and support as a family to face these types of situations because they were always ready to help, no matter where they are from.

Pierre Gasly says the BWT Alpine F1 Team will need to learn and understand why they were so far off the pace during the Italian Grand Prix weekend, with fifteenth the best result possible at the Autodromo Nazionale Monza.

With top speed a major factor in being strong at Monza, Alpine were hindered by their underpower Renault power unit, which is said to be around 30bhp down on their rivals, and neither Gasly nor team-mate Esteban Ocon were able to bring themselves into top ten contention at any point.

Gasly admitted that he expected the team to struggle in Italy, but despite this, it was still a disappointing weekend for everyone at Alpine, particularly as he finished on the podium just seven days previously in the Dutch Grand Prix.

“It’s been super painful,” Gasly is quoted as saying by Motorsport.com. “I don’t think we have ever had such a lack of competitiveness compared to our rivals.

“We knew straight away from the start of the season that it would be a painful one. But yeah, it was clearly very difficult out there.

Kansas Speedway has become a playground for 23XI Racing since they expanded to a two-car operation in 2022, with the #45 in particular sweeping both dates that year with Kurt Busch and Bubba Wallace. After finishing ninth in May, Tyler Reddick is the third driver to win at the 1.5-mile oval in the #45.

Reddick restarted fifth for overtime set up after Chris Buescher suffered a blown tyre, and stalked the battle between Joey Logano and Erik Jones before completing a three-wide pass for the lead coming to the white flag. The dramatic move shot Reddick to the top while 23XI owner and May winner Denny Hamlin followed on the outside to finish second.

The win locks Reddick into the Round of 12 of the NASCAR Cup Series playoffs.

“Last year was the heartbreaker. Two years ago, we just weren’t great, and we went into Bristol and missed it by a couple, but last year we had those wins. We come to this race a year ago and have a flat while leading and fall out very early. We went into Bristol in a bad spot and then got caught up in a wreck,” recalled Reddick.

“To be able to have a lot of points scored—I’m sure even if we didn’t win today and finished second or third, we would have had a lot of points to lean on going into Bristol, so that was just the goal all along. I want to win races, but we don’t take to take the risks in the first round. I think as we keep going along and we get further in and we don’t have the points to start that some of the cars at the very front of the leaderboard do, we’ll have to get more aggressive, but it was very nice to get five playoff points today and gain a few more as we go on to the next round.”

Tensions ran high at Kansas Speedway as the NASCAR Xfinity and Craftsman Truck Series respectively ran their regular season and Round of 10 finales. By the end, as John Hunter Nemechek and Christian Eckes celebrated in Victory Lane, those like Parker Kligerman breathed a sigh of relief while Matt DiBenedetto and Matt Crafton could only begin preparing for 2024.

Kligerman held the twelfth and final Xfinity playoff spot entering Kansas and either needed to win or for someone already locked in to do so. Brandon Jones, who was right behind him in points, tried to steal the win for himself but was no match for Nemechek who led 154 laps to win for the sixth time. Sheldon Creed held off Kligerman for third, but the former was already assured a playoff spot as well and thus made their battle rather meaningless.

“I was the biggest John Hunter Nemechek fan on the planet,” Kligerman remarked. “As I saw the #9 (Jones) fire off, I was like, ‘Oh no! We’ve done all we should do on points. We’re so close. I don’t think I could beat the #20 (Nemechek), but the #9 looks like he might.’ And then obviously the #20 was just so dominant.

“The #2 (Creed) kind of crept up on us and took third. I really wanted third place, but (during) that last run, I had to just be smart, really, really smart, so I drove the smartest race I thought I could drive that put us in a position to not have anything stupid happen, keep us the highest position if we get a late-race restart and go on in the playoffs.”

Although Kligerman will race for a championship in his first season with Big Machine Racing Team, his #48 is not eligible for the owner’s title as Joe Gibbs Racing‘s multi-driver #19 car took that playoff slot via Ryan Truex‘s win at Dover in April. Joe Graf Jr. piloted the #19 at Kansas to his career-high second top ten of the season.

Eryk Goczał and his family-owned EnergyLandia Rally Team are preparing to make the jump from production SSVs to Light Prototypes for the 2024 Dakar Rally. Since Friday, they have been testing a pair of Taurus T3 Max cars from MCE-5 Development.

Goczał became the youngest Dakar Rally overall champion when he claimed the T4 class for production SSVs on début in January at the age of eighteen, winning four stages and holding off father Marek Goczał along with reigning and newly crowned World Rally-Raid T4 Champion Rokas Baciuška. While Marek finished runner-up in the 2022 W2RC and Eryk assumed the points lead with the Dakar win, the family elected to sit out the rest of the 2023 calendar for the younger Goczał to focus on university and compete in the Drift Masters European Championship. He is currently thirteenth in the DMEC driver standings while Poland sits third in the DMEC’s Nations Cup.

In March, Goczał announced he would move up to T3 for the 2024 Rally.

“This is the car I’ve been in France to help to build so I know it from the beginning,” said Goczał. “I believe that I could present the future of Dakar, the future of racing. I finally have a sequential gearbox. I’m more than happy to have two days of testing and to finally test this thing as my training car.”

The Taurus T3 Max has won the last two W2RC rounds with Mitch Guthrie at the Sonora Rally and Desafío Ruta 40, enabling him to take the points lead in a category dominated by Can-Am Mavericks. MCE-5, via Wevers Sport, fielded three Tauruses at the DR 40 for Guthrie, Nicolás Cavigliasso, and Gabriel Rodríguez. For the season-ending Rallye du Maroc in October, MCE-5 has also added BBR Motorsport to the roster.

Overtake!, an anime covering a fictionalised F4 Japanese Championship and Super GT, will air its first episode on 1 October. The pilot was screened at the Super GT round at Suzuka Circuit on 26 August.

The anime was revealed in January, the product of a collaboration between Kadokawa Corporation, studio TROYCA, and the GT Association that oversees both championships. Directed by Ei Aoki, it will be TROYCA’s first sports series with much of the staff from its debut work Aldnoah.Zero returning.

Anan Furuya and Katsuyuki Konishi respectively portray the two main characters Haruka Asahina and Kōya Madoka. Additional cast members were announced in March, followed by Kenta Sasa (Toru Komaki) and Masayuki Katō (Michinori Shosei) in August. Sasa has mainly voiced supporting characters in series such as Interviews with Monster Girls, GATE, and Aldnoah.Zero, while Katō’s most prominent role is as Demiurge in Overlord.

Kanae, a Virtual YouTuber for the NIJISANJI Project, performs the opening theme “Tailwind”. A trailer featuring the song, along with a new visual (see featured image) was released in late August.

The new trailer provides additional paddock chatter between the aforementioned cast along with shots of an F4 race at Mobility Resort Motegi (formerly and better known as Twin Ring Motegi), which hosts the season finales for F4 and Super GT. Motegi is the second track featured after Fuji Speedway was shown in the initial teaser in January. 

In 1982, 31-year-old Shinji Kazama became the first Japanese person to compete at the Paris–Dakar Rally when he finished eighteenth overall among bikes and sixth in the 500cc class. In 2026, over two decades after a massive accident in the 2004 Dakar Rally virtually ended his bike racing career, he hopes to make his return to the legendary event as a 75-year-old competing in the T4 category.

Kazama had intended to race the 2017 or 2018 Dakar Rallies alongside his son Shinnosuke “Shaun” Kazama, but his injuries prevented him from taking part; he hoped to try again in 2020 in a car before going on a bike the next year, though those plans were upended by COVID-19 and said debilitations. Shinji followed along anyway as team manager, though he admitted in an interview with Motor-Fan that not taking part as a racer filled him “with frustration in my heart. However, when I calm down and think about my age, physical strength, and the condition of my legs, I have no choice but to admit that it would be difficult to aim for participating on two wheels.”

At the 2004 edition, shortly after beginning Stage #4, Kazama was hit by a truck competing in that class, resulting in severe leg injuries that hospitalised him for fourteen months and nearly resulted in amputation of his left leg. Unable to resume racing competitively on motorcycles, he became an ambassador for musculoskeletal injury awareness by leading cross-continental expeditions. For example, he rode a scooter across Eurasia in 2008 followed by driving across the longitude of Africa in a Subaru a year later.

Such philanthropy continued to fulfill Kazama’s adventurous nature that he has possessed for much of his life. As a child in Japan, he frequently biked up mountains near his hometown. Following his maiden Dakar, he went on to set world records in elevation ascents on a motorcycle when he successfully reached the summits of Mount Fuji, Aconcagua, Kilimanjaro, and Mount Everest twice. In 1990, he was the second Japanese to climb Vinson Massif in Antarctica after Yuichiro Miura.

In 1987, Kazama reached the North Pole on a Yamaha TW200. Five years later, he repeated the feat with the South Pole, becoming the first person to arrive on both with a motorcycle. He did another pole adventure in 2010 when he travelled from the southernmost point of Chile to the top of Sweden.

Liam Lawson’s second Grand Prix outing saw him just miss out on the top ten in eleventh, but the New Zealander put up a good show at the Autodromo Nazionale Monza.

The Scuderia AlphaTauri driver, standing in for the injured Daniel Ricciardo, made it into Q2 for the first time in his very short FIA Formula 1 World Championship career on Saturday, and was less than two-tenths of a second of making the top ten shootout.

Lawson said he was using his practice sessions to further build his confidence behind the wheel of the AT04 having only stepped into the car for the first time in final practice for the Dutch Grand Prix, and he was happy to get as close to the top ten as he did.

“Overall, we’ve been progressing over the sessions, building up my confidence,” said Lawson after Saturday’s Qualifying session.  “You can feel the limit, but it’s also about knowing the step up in grip between the different compounds, if you make changes what it’s going to do to the car, and that just takes some time.

“With both cars being so close to Q3, we definitely had the potential to make it, but unfortunately, [Fernando] Alonso went off the track right in front of me, so there was some gravel on my line. However, it would’ve been tight regardless.

Valtteri Bottas secured a well-earned point for the Alfa Romeo F1 Team Stake outfit in the Italian Grand Prix, with the Finn using the hard-medium tyre strategy to good use at the Autodromo Nazionale Monza.

Bottas started fourteenth on the grid and made it to lap twenty-five on a used set of hard tyres before making his pit stop, and he used his medium compound to make up a number of positions, passing the likes of Liam Lawson and Logan Sargeant on his way into the top ten.

The Finn said the target was to end the European segment of the season with a top ten finish at Alfa Romeo’s home event, with the point a good reward for the hard work the team have been putting in developing the C43-Ferrari.

“Points were the target today, and we achieved that: it’s nice to be back in the top ten as it had been a while, despite all our hard work, and this point is for everyone at Alfa Romeo,” said Bottas.  “It may be just one point, but it is a good reward for the job done to turn our weekend around, and for the support of our home team from the grandstands.

“It’s been a clean race from our side: our pace had slightly improved from qualifying, and we nailed our strategy, which helped us have some clean air and keep out of trouble.

Shirley Muldowney, whose full name is Shirley Ann Roque Muldowney, is a pioneering figure in the world of drag racing, specifically in the National Hot Rod Association (NHRA). She is often referred to as "The First Lady of Drag Racing" and is known for breaking gender barriers in a male-dominated sport. Here's some key information about Shirley Muldowney:

1. Early Life and Career: Shirley Muldowney was born on June 19, 1940, in Schenectady, New York, USA. She developed an interest in drag racing at an early age and began racing competitively in the 1950s.

2. Breaking Barriers: Shirley Muldowney's career is notable for breaking gender barriers in NHRA drag racing. At a time when female racers were rare, she proved that women could compete at the highest levels of the sport.

3. Top Fuel Champion: Muldowney is best known for her success in the NHRA's Top Fuel category, where she won three NHRA Top Fuel championships in her career (1977, 1980, and 1982). Her 1977 championship victory made her the first woman to win an NHRA pro category championship.

4. Accomplishments: Throughout her career, Shirley Muldowney achieved numerous race victories and records, becoming one of the most successful and respected drag racers in history.

Vadim Pritulyak, the first and only Ukrainian to complete the Dakar Rally on a bike, will bring a pair of wounded Ukrainian soldiers to Spain to race the Rally TT Cuenca, the final round of the Spanish Cross-Country Rally Championship on 20/21 October. The soldiers will be co-drivers on two SKARLAT XTRM buggies, with Pritulyak piloting one of them.

SKARLAT is a Ukrainian UTV brand with a base in the United Arab Emirates, where Pritulyak resides; he is also a spokesman for the marque. Their centrepiece Raptor 1000 is a rebadged Massimo Warrior 1000 MXD Crew, sporting a four-stroke V-twin engine capable of 80 horsepower. Measuring at roughly 154.5 inches (392.43 cm) long by 74.8 in (190 cm) wide and weighing at 2,530 pounds when dry (1,147.59 kg), the four-seater can tow 1,763 pounds (800 kg) which makes it capable of rapid cargo transport and evacuating wounded personnel from battle. A racing-spec version called the XTRM underwent three weeks of testing in desert environments led by in May. He hopes to unveil the SKARLAT at the Rally TT Cuenca and raise interest from outside investors.

XTRM is the name of Pritulyak’s sportswear brand, and his team also competes under the SKARLAT-XTRM banner. Autolife Ukraine, an auto repair shop specialising in restoring vehicles like the Toyota Land Cruiser, will support the team at the Rally TT Cuenca.

In August, the Real Federación Española de Automovilismo‘s inclusivity committee invited the Automobile Federation of Ukraine to bring troops wounded in combat to the Rally TT Cuenca, where they can become navigators for cars competing in the ParaBaja category. The class is organised by ParaBaja Step by Step, an organisation dedicated to providing opportunities in racing for people with reduced mobility. ParaBaja entrants are not timed nor are they included in race results as the programme’s mission is simply to celebrate them taking part.

Vitaliy Yevtyekhov, a Ukrainian co-driver with Dakar Rally experience, applauded the offer and described it as an important step in helping soldiers recovering from the traumas of war. Yevtyekhov also envisioned similar programmes being established for multiple motorsport disciplines across Ukraine and potentially a crew of exclusively injured Ukrainian troops competing at Dakar; the latter is reminiscent of Race2Recovery, a team of British and American troops wounded in Afghanistan, that ran the 2013 and 2014 Dakar Rallies.

Janus van Kasteren will try to become the first non-Russian to win the Dakar Rally‘s truck category in consecutive years since Karel Loprais in 1998 and 1999 when he rejoins Team de Rooy for the 2024 edition. He will once again pilot an IVECO PowerStar as part of the team’s three-truck effort, joined by Michiel Becx and Anja van Loon.

Although the absences of powerhouses KAMAZ-master and MAZ-SPORTauto led to a weaker T5 field than usual, van Kasteren still faced stiff competition in 2023 from Aleš Loprais and fellow IVECO driver Martin Macík Jr. After Loprais withdrew from the second half of the rally due to a fatal accident, van Kasteren and Macík traded blows before the latter suffered a late brake failure that enabled van Kasteren to pull away. Van Kasteren finished over an hour ahead of Macík with three stage wins.

Becx rejoins Team de Rooy after finishing seventeenth in class with them at the 2020 race. He made his début in a car in 2019, then took a year off in 2021 before entering the 2022 Rally in T3. Driving for Arcane Racing, he finished twenty-third in the category. Due to his friend and navigator Edwin Kuijpers overseeing business matters at his company AluShutter, Becx did not race the 2023 event.

Van Loon finished fourteenth in T3 at the 2023 Rally before beginning a transition to trucks, placing fifth among trucks at the Morocco Desert Challenge in April. She will lead an all-female crew alongside Floor Maten and Suzanne Peek, the first such trio for a truck team since Véronique Jacquot, Géraldine Brucy, and Uta Baier in 2004.

The three trucks will enter the Rallye du Maroc on 13–18 October as a final dress rehearsal before the 2024 Dakar Rally begins on 5 January. While the trucks are only appearing at two rounds in 2023, van Kasteren can secure the World Rally-Raid Championship in T5 at Morocco; he currently leads Macík by eleven points. 2023 is expected to be the final year of the T5 championship before being discontinued due to a lack of entries outside of Dakar and Morocco.

McLaren F1 Team’s Lando Norris was satisfied with the pace of his MCL60 at Autodromo Nazionale Monza, finishing off his weekend with an eighth place result at the Italian Grand Prix. 

After battling with the Alex Albon throughout the race, Norris commended the Williams Racing driver for his strong performance, having held off the McLarens through to the end. 

“A good race. I think the pace was strong today. It was just very difficult to overtake, as usual, but when we didn’t have to overtake, the pace was good.

“We could pressure Alex the whole race, but he did a very good job, so hats off to him and Williams, they were quick this weekend and managed to stay ahead.”

Norris said that eighth place was all the team could have asked for in Monza, and thanked the team back at headquarters for putting together such a strong upgrade after losing some ground to other teams in Spa. 

The Aston Martin Aramco Cognizant Formula 1 Team scored only two points during the Italian Grand Prix weekend, but Team Principal Mike Krack says it was little consolation in what was a difficult weekend for the Silverstone-based outfit.

Fernando Alonso finished ninth at the Autodromo Nazionale Monza, whilst Lance Stroll struggled home in sixteenth as Aston Martin’s AMR23 car struggled in its low downforce configuration. 

Neither driver was able to make any real progress from their starting positions, Alonso only gaining from an enforced pit stop for a new front wing Oscar Piastri, while Stroll finished ahead only of the two MoneyGram Haas F1 Team drivers having started twentieth and last on the grid.

Krack said they knew that the Italian Grand Prix was going to be difficult for Aston Martin, and he says they will take what they learned from the weekend into the design of the 2024 AMR24 car. 

However, he hopes the team can come back fighting in Singapore in two weeks time as they bid to reclaim third place in the Constructors’ Championship, having lost the spot to Scuderia Ferrari at Monza.

Fernando Alonso could only finish ninth in the Italian Grand Prix, with the veteran Spaniard admitting it was a difficult and physically challenging race at the Autodromo Nazionale Monza.

The Aston Martin Aramco Cognizant Formula 1 Team driver was unable to show the same kind of pace he has been able to at other points during the 2023 FIA Formula 1 World Championship season, and he was left to battle for the minor points placings rather than the podium.

Alonso had hoped to gain a place thanks to a time penalty for Mercedes AMG Petronas Formula One Team’s Lewis Hamilton, but once the Briton had overtaken Williams Racing’s Alexander Albon, that chance of eighth place had gone.

“It was a very difficult race today and it was one of the most physically challenging of the year,” said Alonso.  “We will take many lessons from this weekend and look to be better next time.

“I had some hope we might be able to catch Lewis [Hamilton] when he had the penalty, but as soon as he passed Alex [Albon] I knew it would be difficult.”