Motorsports Racing News & Blog Articles

Russell Boyle last raced in the Stadium Super Trucks in 2019, but hopes to come back eventually.

“We are not giving up on making a comeback into this series, we look forward to joining back in the near future,” said Boyle.

He made his series début in 2015 at his hometown race Honda Indy Toronto, finishing ninth and seventh in two races, followed by a pair of tenths at the 2016 weekend. Although Toronto was removed from the 2017 and 2018 calendars, he returned to the series at the latter’s Detroit Grand Prix weekend in replacement duty for SST founder Robby Gordon, who was racing the Baja 500; Boyle placed seventh and ninth in Gordon’s #7 after being beset by late contact in both, and points earned by Boyle went towards Gordon’s eventual third-place championship finish.

Toronto came back for the 2019 SST slate, where Boyle finished a career-best fifth in Race #1 and sixth in the second. He has not raced in SST since as COVID-19 and Gordon’s business obligations knocked Toronto off the schedule, prompting him to focus primarily on karting.

The 23-year-old currently runs RTB Motorsports, which includes a karting driver development programme newly introduced for 2023.

Red Bull Racing Team Principal Christian Horner praised Max Verstappen’s stellar performance at the Spanish Grand Prix, having led from start to finish and pulled a gap of twenty-four seconds to Lewis Hamilton in second place. 

“Another great performance from Max. The start was strong, he had to be firm but fair with Carlos into the first turn and from there he managed the race really well. 

“We ran all three compounds today and he had the pace to cover whatever was going on behind him finishing with a 24 second gap by the end of the race. Max was totally in control.”

Alongside Verstappen’s dominant effort, Horner said that the team is at the top of its game from strategy to technical prowess, and is continuously improving in order to support their drivers. 

“But it’s not just Max, the whole Team is operating at an elite level. We have a phenomenal car, we have two great drivers and we are continuing to evolve and become more polished.”

Red Bull Racing’s Max Verstappen secured his fifth win of the season at the Spanish Grand Prix with a dominant effort– converting his pole position, leading every lap of the race and earning the fastest lap award. 

Verstappen described driving the rapid RB19 as a “massive pleasure,” helping him pull a massive lead of about twenty-four seconds by time the checkered flag fell and focus primarily on protecting his tyres. 

“To win here again feels incredible. It’s a massive pleasure to drive a car like this. It was important to try and keep the lead into turn one, it was quite tight. From there onwards it was about managing the tyres, I was able to create a big gap.”

The reigning World Champion said that he had some trouble with the hard compound tyre after his first stop, which ended up holding him back some on the pace front. This led him to change to the softs to take him to the end of the race. 

“We went on to the hards but I didn’t seem to have much grip, I was sliding around quite a lot, the pace was okay but I couldn’t create more of a gap, so we switched to softs and then I just needed to bring it home. 

Nick Cassidy endured a double-header to forget in Jakarta last weekend, as the Kiwi lost the lead of the 2022/23 ABB FIA Formula E World Championship to Pascal Wehrlein.

Having entered the Jakarta E-Prix with back-to-back wins and five podiums from six races, Cassidy was expected to thrive as the championship leader; instead, he faltered. The Envision Racing driver qualified tenth on Saturday ahead of the tenth round of the championship and did well to recover to seventh, before it all went wrong on Sunday.

Cassidy again qualified tenth on Sunday, whilst his title rivals for the second race in a row were all starting towards the front. Aware that he was going to lose a huge chunk of points, Cassidy arguably pushed over the limit to get amongst the frontrunners, resulting in a costly mistake. The Kiwi clipped Wehrlein having attempted a huge divebomb, breaking the Envision driver’s front wing in the process.

He was forced to pit for repairs, dropping him to the foot of the field. Cassidy ultimately crossed the line in eighteenth, to cement a miserable weekend in Southeast Asia. Envision struggled throughout the weekend in Jakarta, with it having been a common theme amongst all the Jaguar powertrains. He admitted that Sunday’s woeful race was “overdue”, with him having made several mistakes in qualifying and in the race.

“A day like this was overdue,” Cassidy told Formula E’s world feed whilst in an ice bath after Sunday’s race.

Max Verstappen took a dominant victory at the Spanish Grand Prix but it was the Mercedes-AMG Petronas F1 Team duo that took the headlines, with both Lewis Hamilton and George Russell finishing on the podium, with the latter coming from twelfth on the grid.

It was win number forty for Verstappen, who finished over twenty seconds ahead of Hamilton in second, followed by Russell, who was almost caught by Sergio Pérez with a few laps to go.

What Happened In The Race?

The start of the race was an eventful one, Carlos Sainz Jr. started his home race on the front row alongside Verstappen and almost got ahead of the Dutchman, who started on the medium tyre compound. The Spaniard, cheered on by his home crowd, went for a move up the inside but it was quickly covered off by Verstappen, who got through the start with his lead intact.

There was contact between Hamilton and Lando Norris, who started third, which seemed to be a reaction to the battle between Sainz and Verstappen ahead of them. Russell also made up a few positions on the start but was soon under investigation for gaining an advantage after taking the off-road to avoid contact with Oscar Piastri. The stewards deemed the decision by Russell to be the right one and took no further action on the incident.

Norris fell to the back of the grid after having to replace his front wing, and never really recovered from the incident, finishing outside the points. Hamilton was left to fight Lance Stroll, who passed the Brit after his contact with Norris. Hamilton soon overtook Stroll though for third, with the help of DRS. Russell was making moves too, getting past Fernando Alonso for sixth.

The Taklimakan Rally, China’s premier rally raid, ran from 20 May through 1 June in its first edition since 2019 after three years off due to COVID-19.

Zi Yungliang won in the cars with a total time of 34:16:09, 5:30 ahead of the World Rally-Raid Championship duo of Zhang Guoyu and Oriol Mena. Zhang’s BAIC ORV ally Liu Yangui joined him on the podium, though nearly fifty-four minutes back. Zi was also a BAIC driver at the Dakar Rally in January, but ran Taklimakan as a privateer in his own T1.2 car rather than the BAIC BJ40 of the the others.

The venerable Toyota Hilux placed fourth with Xu Dali as driver. Sun Ping piloted the Hilux’s W2RC rival vehicle Prodrive Hunter, but did not finish.

Unlike the Chinese-dominated cars, the bikes featured plenty of variety as South Africa’s Bradley Cox won the overall ahead of his Lithuanian team-mate Arūnas Gelažninkas with a time of 24:28:05. Cox, another W2RC face, was making his début in China with Red Camel Racing.

“I had lots of fun in this rally, the people are nice, our team is great,” said Cox. “This is my first trip to China. I hope to continue the luck and be the champion during my next trip to China. As to the rally, my favourite part is for sure the dunes, the view of snow mountain is also amazing. I would definitely stop and take a photo if it was not in the game.”

Not a lot of people were thrilled at the end of Sunday’s NASCAR Cup Series race at World Wide Technology Raceway at Gateway. The race had been delayed after just two laps by lightning, four drivers were forced to retire after their brake rotors exploded and sent them into the wall, teams lost their wi-fi capabilities when an off-site fibre connection failed, and eleven cautions occurred that set up overtime.

Kyle Busch was one of the few happy faces as he led 121 of 243 laps including the final sixty for his third win of the year. He faced a challenge from Denny Hamlin and Kyle Larson in overtime but kept them at bay to secure the win.

Overtime was activated when Bubba Wallace‘s brake rotor failed and sent him into the turn one wall with four laps remaining. The same fate befell his 23XI Racing team-mate Tyler Reddick on lap 176, as did Noah Gragson and Carson Hocevar that ended their days. Reddick was also spun by Ricky Stenhouse Jr. just two laps into the race before a series of lightning strikes prompted a red flag that lasted an hour and forty-five minutes.

“I obviously don’t know what package they ran,” Busch added. “I’m sure they would run the short track package here for brakes. I never felt any vibration, never had any issue, never had any long pedal or nothing with mine. I was confident in our stuff and what we had going. I felt like that was actually a really strong suit for me today, was on the brakes, get in the corner, get whoa’d up in time for the rest of the corner.”

While he did not have the issues, Michael McDowell suggested the brake failures could be due to Gateway having “really hard braking and really strong straightaways, so you’re heating and cooling, and a lot of times that creates fractures and those cracks sometimes explode. I think that’s what you saw today. I don’t know, I’m not an engineer, but typically too much tape on the grille will get them hot and then too cold.”

Well, my 2023 season is well underway and I’ve already scored six podiums so it’s a great start for me in what is my 20th year of motorsport competition! 

I’m contesting a full season in the prestigious Porsche Carrera Cup GB courtesy of the Perthshire-based award winning Glenturret Distillery.

I’m driving a brand new Porsche 911 GT3 Cup entered and prepared by Middlesborough-based Redline Racing. The Glenturret Distillery is the oldest working distillery in Scotland. 

Additional support comes from long-standing, local Thornhill-based sponsors AL-2 Teknik UK, a specialised water treatment service provider, and PyroDry, plus Carronbridge Sawmill.

I achieved nine top-six placings, including one outright win, in the 2020 series and scored some decent results during limited campaigns in 2019, ’21 and last year so I’m hopeful for further success.

Trophy Trucks might be SCORE International‘s premier class, but Saturday’s Baja 500 was eager for their blood.

While attrition was relatively on par for the 500 (the 2022 edition had eighteen finishers in TT while 2023 just saw one fewer), many trucks were plagued by mechanical issues throughout the day. Most notably, points leader and San Felipe 250 winner Luke McMillin lost his power steering pump early on, followed by hitting a rock that destroyed a brake caliper and his fourth and fifth gears in what he attributed to “just driving too hard,” and eventually finished off the podium in fourth. His brother Dan McMillin suffered a bent gear shaft after eighty miles and had to replace his steering box, but managed to reach the finish in seventh.

Alan Ampudia, who finished second to McMillin in San Felipe, retired after 223 miles with a mechanical failure. Team Australia’s woes also continued as the power steering box broke while Toby Price was running in seventh, followed by the yoke doing the same with Paul Weel at RM 330. Variants in the Legends and Spec categories also saw victims like Elijah Kiger and Broc Dickerson‘s #238 TT Spec blowing a transmission at RM 140 and classmate Christopher Polvoorde breaking a differential 150 miles later.

Other classes weren’t safe either like Class 1, where Brad Wilson battled with Cody Reid for the lead before retiring with a transmission problem, and San Felipe victor Cody Parkhouse rolled just twenty-five miles into the race.

The #16 TT of Cameron Steele and Ryan Arciero and #55L TT Legends of Jose Flores were involved in perhaps the largest accident of the day. Arciero was chasing Gary Magness and Flores down a narrow road exiting Ojos Negros when the trio started to stack up and Arciero rammed into the slowing Flores. While Flores was able to finish fifth in his class, the #16 was out altogether.

Johan Kristoffersson has had the perfect start to the 2023 FIA World Rallycross Championship. The five-time and reigning champion secured victory at Montalegre, Portugal, in tumultuous conditions, holding off the opposition to take a commanding win.

Kristoffersson once again demonstrated his mastery of the sport. His unbeaten SuperPole run continues, followed by a clean sweep of heat wins, a semi-final win, and ultimate triumph in the final. In the revised rules for the 2023 season, that means that the Swedish superstar has the full 23 points available after the first weekend of racing.

Acknowledging the complexities of the weekend, Kristoffersson said “to win here, you have to overcome so many challenges – just when you think you have everything under control, the weather and track conditions change again! The car was an absolute weapon throughout so big thanks to everybody in the team for making this possible“. He truly is the man to beat this season, and so far there doesn’t seem to be anyone with an answer to his phenomenal pace.

As is common for opening rounds, it felt like several teams were trying to find their pace. Hansen World RX Team, who position themselves as Kristofferson’s main rivals, struggled on the first day before finding some pace on Sunday. After contact with his brother in the semi-final, Timmy Hansen found himself unexpectedly out of the final race of the weekend. Kevin Hansen survived and made it through to the final, where he did an amazing job of controlling his car despite a puncture caused by opening lap contact.

Team manager and rallycross legend Kenneth Hansen takes solace from the podium finish for one of his drivers. “We are not at winning pace yet,” he admitted, “but we are working hard and looking forward to Norway to see what we can do there“. Kevin Hansen held off a determined charge from Niclas Grönholm, with both drivers demonstrating the importance of the rallycross maxim “rubbing is racing”.

With the 2023 Championship Off-Road season on the horizon, Kyle LeDuc will not be present as he battles stage IV head and neck cancer. He publicised his diagnosis on Sunday, having been fighting the cancer since November.

A seven-time Pro 4 truck champion, LeDuc came up short in his quest for an eighth in 2022 when he finished runner-up to C.J. Greaves. He scored three wins in the class that year, including a sweep at Dirt City Motorplex.

Outside the Midwest, he contested his second Extreme E campaign for Chip Ganassi Racing alongside Sara Price, and the duo scored theirs and CGR’s maiden victory at the first Island X Prix. However, RJ Anderson replaced LeDuc for the finale in Uruguay due to what was publicly stated as a scheduling conflict, which turned out to be the cancer as the race took place in late November following his diagnosis. Anderson has since become CGR’s full-time driver for 2023.

“We had hopes that (son) Reed and myself and the whole family and team would be in the Midwest and able to compete but the way treatments and plans have changed we will not be able too,” wrote LeDuc. “I just wanted to let our fans, followers and friends know what my little family has been battling and that we’re giving it everything we have to come out the other end of this.”

Stage IV cancer is the most difficult to defeat as the cancer has spread from its starting point to at least one other organ, though it is not always terminal depending on how the body reacts to treatment and one’s age and lifestyle. According to the National Cancer Institute’s Surveillance, Epidemiology, and End Results programme, head and neck cancer’s five-year survival rate can range from forty percent for metastatic throat cancer to over ninety percent for the mouth, though the numbers decline in later stages.

The Dakar Rally returns to Saudi Arabia for a fifth year in 2024. Revealed Saturday at Châteaux de Lastours in France, sixty percent of the 2024 route will go through new areas that the rally had not previously visited while its centrepiece is a new 48H Chrono Stage.

The Chrono Stage will replace the Empty Quarter Marathon, though marathon rules that ban competitors from receiving assistance from their teams remain in place and it will still go through the Rub’ al Khali desert. The 48-hour, 600-kilometre stage will split the FIA and FIM entries into different routes; the first FIA teams to start the stage will receive time bonuses as they no longer have the benefit of following the path laid down by the bikes, a perk that is already used for FIM riders. By 4 PM on the first day, all teams must report to the nearest mini-bivouac, of which there will be eight with limited resources due to the marathon conditions, before resuming the next day at 7 AM to complete the stage.

In total, the rally will be twelve stages long following the Prologue and roughly 5,000 kilometres in distance. It will begin in Al-‘Ula and head westward before going back to end in Yanbu along the Red Sea, the coast of which was the site of the 2023 Dakar Rally’s opener.

Each stage will also feature a 100-km deviation for select entrants racing a vehicle powered by environmentally friendly sources like hydrogen or fully electric.

Other changes from 2023 include restricting the Dakar Classic to 100 competitors. 187 took part in the 2023 edition.

Jaguar TCS Racing Team Principal James Barclay was quick to share how “hugely proud” he was of the entire team following Mitch Evans‘ podium on Sunday at the Jakarta E-Prix, a day after the team suffered a complete nightmare.

The eleventh round of the 2022/23 ABB FIA Formula E World Championship will be remembered much more fondly by Jaguar than the tenth round on Saturday, where Sam Bird went into the back of Evans for the second time this season. The team scored zero points on Saturday and knew a big result was needed on Sunday, in regard to both championships.

Evans was a man on a mission on Sunday and qualified third, whilst Bird could only manage fourteenth. The Briton failed to even start the race following a technical issue, summarising his woeful weekend. Evans though, knew he had to convert his second row start into a mega result, to keep his title hopes alive. That’s exactly what he did, as he converted third on the grid into the final spot on the rostrum, raising him to fourth in the Drivers’ Championship.

Jaguar are also just about still in the fight for the Constructors’ Championship, with them now being forty-one points behind TAG Heuer Porsche Formula E Team with five races remaining. Whilst the Coventry-based side are narrowly hanging on to the fight, another slip up can’t occur.

Barclay praised Evans for his “huge result” and thanked the team for their “massive effort”, following Saturday’s nightmare.

After Ash Sutton‘s dominance over this past weekend at Thruxton, Dan Rowbottom added to the celebrations for NAPA Racing UK with a superb victory in Race Three as the latest weekend of British Touring Car Championship (BTCC) action comes to a close.

Adam Morgan started on pole and made a superb getaway, with Aiden Moffat proving to be the cork in the bottle behind albeit the cork stayed barring for Rowbottom who slipped through.

He surged through in a superb move all the way round the outside at the Complex and went about hunting down Morgan. The gap continued to come down and before Church, Rowbottom made his move stick on Lap 10.

He surged ahead from there to seal the win and end what was initially a poor day which soon turned into glory. Morgan held onto second, whilst Moffat defended to fend off Colin Turkington ahead of Ricky Collard and Aron Taylor-Smith.

Further down, Tom Ingram gained points on Ash Sutton finishing in 10th, with the championship leader unable to make any further forward progress despite being hyped for a potential hat-trick pre Race Three.

Mitch Evans kept his title hopes alive with a hard-fought podium on Sunday at the eleventh round of the 2022/23 ABB FIA Formula E World Championship in Jakarta, just a day after he was taken out again by his team-mate.

Saturday’s nightmare put Evans under significant pressure on Sunday, with the Kiwi having entered the day knowing he had to deliver an exceptional result. It was clear in qualifying that he meant business, as the Jaguar TCS Racing driver secured third on the grid. He managed to retain third at the start of the race and actually led briefly in the opening stages, before falling behind winner Maximilian Günther and championship rival Jake Dennis.

It was clear that Evans really didn’t have good race pace, as he quickly slipped well behind the leading duo. Evans was constantly looking in his mirrors as a train formed behind him, with Günther having been a remarkable eighteen seconds up the road by the end of the race. Somehow, Evans held on for the podium to claim his fourth rostrum from the last six races, promoting him to fourth in the standings.

Thanks to his podium, he sits twenty-five points behind new championship leader Pascal Wehrlein with five races remaining, meaning he is still right in the mix. He admitted after the race that the podium was a “huge relief” following Saturday’s woes, where he lost so many points.

“After yesterday’s race, to go home with a trophy and a smile is a huge relief and feels good. We lacked a lot of pace in the race and didn’t have as much energy as Max and Jake ahead, but I was able to hold off those behind me to come home on the podium. Looking forward to racing at the Portland E-Prix for the first time.”