Motorsports Racing News & Blog Articles

Peter Sauber has thanked Frédéric Vasseur for his efforts across the past six years as Team Principal at Alfa Romeo F1 Team ORLEN as the search for his successor goes on.

The founder of the Sauber F1 Team that debuted in the FIA Formula 1 World Championship back in 1993 says that Vasseur did a lot of hard work in helping the team move up the order in the Constructors’ Championship, with a sixth-place finish coming in 2022 thanks to the on-track efforts of Valtteri Bottas and Zhou Guanyu. Vasseur will now move on to replace Mattia Binotto as Team Principal at Scuderia Ferrari in 2023.

Andreas Seidl has recently been appointed as the new Chief Executive Officer at the Sauber Group ahead of the 2023 season after the German left his post as Team Principal of the McLaren F1 Team, and Sauber believes the signing of Seidl was an excellent one for the Hinwil-based outfit.

“I am convinced that it is a very good solution for Hinwil, because the tasks that await everyone are very demanding,” said Sauber to Swiss publication Blick about Seidl’s appointment.

“But we should also not forget to thank Vasseur. He took over the team around six years ago in a difficult situation. Now he leaves with a sixth place in the World Championship. That’s great.”

Despite reliability issues during the 2022 FIA Formula 1 World Championship season, Esteban Ocon feels the BWT Alpine F1 Team have a ‘good asset’ with the Renault power unit, and he can only see it getting better.

Alpine and Renault opted to focus on performance ahead of reliability ahead of a planned development freeze on performance ahead of the 2022 season until 2025.  Subsequent changes can only be made to the engine to fix reliability issues, so Alpine will have the chance to solve some or all of those problems they faced ahead of the 2023 campaign.

Ocon believes the power unit is already strong, and if they can sort the reliability concerns that affected both him and team-mate Fernando Alonso in 2022, then he and his new team-mate Pierre Gasly can expect a strong season to come in 2023.

“I think it’s very good, it’s one of our good assets,” Ocon is quoted as saying by PlanetF1.com.  “As we’ve seen in Brazil we had good straight-line speed, very good, I was quite impressed with that, we were able to do good overtakes.

“I don’t have the numbers, I’m not really too curious on that side, I let the engineer look at that, but it’s definitely working well.”

With 2023 now upon us, it’s time to stop reflecting on what went down last season and start focusing on the year ahead, with the ABB FIA Formula E World Championship just a matter of days away from a truly monumental campaign.

2022 was a phenomenal year for the all-electric series and has been dubbed by many as its best yet, with new host cities, action-packed races, and a four-way title fight that went right down to the wire. As incredible as Season Eight was, though, it also marked a goodbye, to the second generation of Formula E.

The much loved Gen2 challenger is very much now in the past, with generation three of Formula E being the present and the future, as the sport gets itself ready for Mexico City. For Season Nine of the electric single-seater series the sport has taken a bold risk, by introducing new cars which are faster, lighter, more powerful, more efficient, and drastically different visually, partly due to the new 470bhp cars boasting front and rear powertrains.

Gen3 of Formula E is a stroke of engineering genius, there is no doubt about that, with the cars being a a huge leap forwards both technologically and in regard to its engineering, compared to Gen2. This huge leap, though, has caused a number of issues. Resource woes, battery faults, and technical malfunctions have seen the FIA and Formula E running around like mad, to ensure not only that a championship can take place, but that the drivers can compete safely.

Thankfully, it does seem like most of the issues with the Gen3 machinery have been solved, with the majority of the teams having conducted a successful week of pre-season testing at the Circuit Ricardo Tormo, Valencia, in December. Some technical issues were still evident, though, with Sébastian Buemi having crashed without being able to slow his car following a malfunction. A braking failsafe system is set to be implemented, but likely won’t be available until the first few races have been completed, a concern that has been raised by the drivers.

After being a one-car stable for their first two seasons in the NASCAR Xfinity Series, Jordan Anderson Racing Bommarito Autosport will field a duo in 2023 as Parker Retzlaff takes over the #31 Chevrolet Camaro while Jeb Burton drives the new #27.

Nineteen-year-old Retzlaff is enjoying a fast rise through the stock car ladder, turning a pair of ARCA East seasons into a part-time Xfinity ride with RSS Racing and Our Motorsports in 2022. He quickly made the most of his nine starts by placing tenth in just his second race at Richmond along with four more top-twenty finishes. He also did a Truck Series one-off for Young’s Motorsports at Talladega and finished sixteenth.

“I am truly humbled to be given this opportunity to race full-time with JAR Bommarito Autosport,” said Retzlaff. “Without great partners like Funkaway and Ponsse, I would not be in the position today to compete at this level of American motorsport. Jordan and John (Bommarito, team partner) have assembled a great team for me, and I know with everyone’s hard work in the offseason, we will be in a great position to have a fast car when we unload at Daytona come February.”

Burton moves over from Our Motorsports, meaning he reunites with Retzlaff after the two ran four races together. Also driving the #27 for Our, he finished sixteenth in points but failed to score a top ten; he announced his departure from Our in October. By moving to JAR, he hopes to have a similarly successful campaign to 2021 when he won at Talladega and placed tenth in the standings for Kaulig Racing.

The second-generation racer has competed in the Xfinity Series since 2013, albeit on a limited basis save for an aborted full-time campaign in 2016. He competed in the Truck Series between 2020 and 2020 with a pair of full stints in 2013 and 2014, winning at Texas the first year en route to a fifth-place points run. He also attempted the entire Cup Series season in 2015.

It has been a difficult Dakar Rally for the Prodrive Hunters as tyre failures and other similar misfortunes have marred their quartet of drivers throughout the race despite placing two on the T1 podium in the rain-shortened third stage. Matters seemed to worsen in the Stage #4 Ha’il loop as three suffered major issues, but Sébastien Loeb was able to buck the trend and escape with the win.

After finishing second in Stage #1, the 2022 runner-up seemed to have his luck run out across the next two legs with three blown tyres and a mechanical issue plaguing him. Although dropped down to twenty-sixth in the overall standings, Loeb held off the Audis of Stéphane Peterhansel and Carlos Sainz for the T1 victory. He beat Peterhansel by thirteen seconds, but even this did not go without a hitch as he lost his power steering in the closing run.

“That’s great to take the stage again on the Dakar. It’s a great feeling as it proves we have the speed with the Hunter,” said Loeb. “We pushed really hard from the start to the end of the stage as the car was going well. Everything was good. About eighty kilometres from the end of the stage, I felt the power steering tighten a little but then twenty kilometres from the end it went so we had to be quite a bit slower in the dunes to the finish, but we did what we could and it worked. We’re happy to be on the top step today.”

The full-distance win provides some much-needed relief for the Hunters. Orlando Terranova, Loeb’s partner at Bahrain Raid Xtreme who finished third in Stage #3, retired from the Rally altogether after aggravating a lower back injury he sustained in a hard landing during Tuesday’s stage. Vaidotas Žala suffered from oil leakage in his Hunter’s two right-rear shock absorbers, while Stage #3 winner Guerlain Chicherit had a broken rear suspension arm just nine minutes into the fourth followed by losing power steering.

The 2023 Dakar Rally has proven to be more attrition-heavy than previous editions in Saudi Arabia, and this continued to be evident beyond the Hunters’ bad luck. Bike team Hero MotoSports was particularly hit hard on Wednesday as Franco Caimi was their lone rider of four to not have any problems en route to a seventeenth-place finish; Joaquim Rodrigues fell off his bike after ninety kilometres and broke his left femur, requiring a medical airlift, while Ross Branch and Stage #2 runner-up Sebastian Bühler respectively suffered a mechanical failure and ran out of fuel. T1 driver Benediktas Vanagas also withdrew mid-race for medical attention due to concussion-like symptoms.

2021 Porsche Carrera Cup GB Pro-Am champion Ryan Ratcliffe will be returning to the Carrera Cup GB grid once again with Team Parker Racing for a sixth season along with adding a new European challenge.

While 2022 wasn’t a championship winning year for the 29-year-old, Ratcliffe claimed six podium finishes throughout the year as the series switched to the 992-style Porsche 911 GT3 Cup car.

“Last year wasn’t my best, but that’s motorsport and you have your highs and lows. Considering the amount of DNFs we had, to finish where we did was good and it’s time to forget about that and move forward,” said Ratcliffe.

In addition to the GB campaign, Ratcliffe will line up on the Porsche Carrera Cup Benelux grid with the sister team Parker Revs Motorsport, the team that took former GB champion Harry King to the Benelux title in 2022. The Benelux campaign will see him race at  Spa-Francorchamps, Hockenheimring, Zandvoort, Assen, Zolder, and Red Bull Ring.

“2023 is going to be my busiest year and one I’m really looking forward to. This new car is suited more to the big open European tracks, so it’ll be nice to spend a bit of time in the car on circuits like that. It’s going to be useful to do two championships in the same car, meaning more track time which can only benefit me,” he added.

Yuki Tsunoda says he was unable to enjoy his 2022 FIA Formula 1 World Championship season as Scuderia AlphaTauri struggled for performance despite the Japanese racer feeling he was in a much better position, both physically and mentally, than before.

AlphaTauri were one of the disappointing stories of the 2022 season, the Faenza-based squad dropping to ninth place in the Constructors’ Championship, scoring only thirty-five points having managed one hundred and forty-two in 2021.

Tsunoda himself scored twenty less points than he managed in 2021, his twelve of 2022 being made up of four top-ten finishes, the best being a seventh-place finish in the Emilia Romagna Grand Prix in April.  Team-mate Pierre Gasly fared little better, the Frenchman scoring only twenty-three points last season, a drop of eighty-seven points compared to the year before.

The twenty-two-year-old felt he had progressed in his second season of Formula 1 compared to his first, but the fact the team struggled throughout the year made it difficult for him to prove just how improvement he had made on track.

And Tsunoda hopes 2023, where he will have a new team-mate in Nyck de Vries following Gasly’s departure to the BWT Alpine F1 Team, will give him the chance to show just how much he has progressed as a driver.

Following their debut at Donington Park back in October 2022 GT Cup champions Simon Orange and Michael O’Brien will join the Intelligent Money British GT Championship for a full-time season in the Orange Racing powered by JMH McLaren 720S GT3.

The Pro Am pairing clinched fourth place at the 2022 Donington Decider with O’Brien setting the fastest lap in the process. The team’s preparations for 2023 also an entry in to the Asian Le Mans Series which takes place through February. British GT race winner Marcus Clutton will join the team for the four races.

2023 will see O’Brien make a full season return after last contesting a season alongside James Baldwin back in 2020. Since then, his association with McLaren has seen him racing elsewhere, but his most notable success was taking the GTH championship in GT Cup in a 570S GT4.

O’Brien returned to the cockpit of a 720S at the start of last year alongside Orange who won GT Cup’s Overall and GTA championships in 2020. He then retained his GTA title in 2021 before going on to win the Overall, GT3 and Teams’ Championships in 2022 with O’Brien in what proved to be a stellar season for the team.

Orange is now hoping to carry that form into his first full-season British GT campaign, which begins at Oulton Park over Easter Bank Holiday Weekend.

Valtteri Bottas says that whilst the news that Audi Sport will link-up with the Sauber F1 Team ahead of the 2026 FIA Formula 1 World Championship season, their focus remains on getting the most out of the 2023 campaign.

For the final time in 2023, Sauber will be known as Alfa Romeo F1 Team ORLEN, ending a five-year partnership with the Italian marque, and Bottas will again race for the team he joined ahead of the 2022 season alongside Zhou Guanyu.

The team finished an encouraging sixth in the Constructors’ Championship in 2022, with Bottas scoring the bulk of Alfa Romeo’s points tally, his fifth-place finish in the Emilia Romagna Grand Prix marking his best finish of the season.

Audi will join the team in 2026 when the new engine regulations come into play, but despite the distraction of the future link-up, Bottas is certain the team are focused on the current and will be looking to better what they achieved in 2022.

“Everyone has understood that for this team it’s a great opportunity in the future, which definitely gives good stability,” said Bottas to GPFans.com. 

Zak Brown has moved to criticise the unfair comments that have been made since the McLaren F1 Team opted to replace Daniel Ricciardo with Oscar Piastri for the 2023 FIA Formula 1 World Championship season.

Despite a disappointing two years with the Woking-based team, Ricciardo was still able to take McLaren’s first win since 2012 when he took the chequered flag first in the 2021 Italian Grand Prix, but aside from that, he has not been able to show his best form and was heavily beaten by team-mate Lando Norris in the championship in 2022.

Brown himself has said the partnership between team and driver had failed to meet expectations, but he has hit back at the backlash the decision to terminate Ricciardo’s contract a year early, calling the accusations both unfair and unjustified, and he feels some people have overstepped and said things that are not at all appropriate.

“It’s been a very tough year, and it’s personal, business is personal, specifically Daniel, who’s been tremendous to work with and gave us our first win,” Brown said in an official video release from McLaren.  “We had a lot of fun together and you know, we had a lot of frustration together that it didn’t work.

“I think the challenging part is being judged by people that aren’t really close to it, and everyone has an opinion and that’s fine, and that’s sport, I think you can’t be in sport and then not kind of have a thick skin, that the fans in the grandstands or the media are going to have their views.

Guenther Steiner admitted the Haas F1 Team were very close to reaching the budget cap limit during the 2022 FIA Formula 1 World Championship season, and he expects all ten teams to be at or around that limit in 2023.

Haas enjoyed a much more fruitful 2022 season thanks to concentrating all of their resources from 2021 in developing their VF22, with the team securing eighth place in the Constructors’ Championship, ahead of both Scuderia AlphaTauri and Williams Racing. 

They were also able to secure their first ever pole position in the sport when Kevin Magnussen took top spot in Qualifying for the São Paulo Grand Prix in November.

Steiner is confident that Haas have the potential to make another step forward in 2023, and he believes they have the resources, both financially thanks to the arrival of MoneyGram as title sponsors, and technically, to be able to do that.

“We were very close to the budget limit this year,” Steiner is quoted as saying by Motorsport.com.  “I think we didn’t perform like other teams. It wasn’t because of the money this year, but more because of when we started.

Lewis Hamilton joked that there appeared to be a ‘ghost in the car’ during the 2022 FIA Formula 1 World Championship season that kept coming back, seemingly just after the Mercedes-AMG Petronas Formula One Team had made progress with its troublesome W13.

For the first time in his Formula 1 career, Hamilton failed to take a victory nor a pole position in 2022, and this can be linked with the troubles Mercedes had as they suffered with an ill-feeling car right from the first test of the year.

They had some good weekends where they believed they had got on top of the problems, such as the Spanish Grand Prix in May, but after each good race seemingly came another disastrous weekend where they suffered more issues with the car.

And it was not until around the United States Grand Prix in October where they finally seemed to have a car that both Hamilton and team-mate George Russell could be confident to attack with.

“The first big step was Barcelona, that was our first hint of there being more potential in the car,” said Hamilton in an interview on Mercedes official website. 

Petter Solberg has accomplished much in his long career, winning the World Rally Championship in 2003 and the World Rallycross Championship twice. But now, he wants to add rally raid to his résumé.

Speaking with Norwegian news radio station NRK Nyheter on Tuesday, Solberg revealed he is looking into pursuing the Dakar Rally as early as 2024 and has been training for such an effort.

“I feel in very good shape now and have been fully training during the day,” he commented. “It may be time for the six-pack to come out again.”

Solberg previously considered entering the Dakar Rally in 2016, but decided against it to focus on the World Rallycross Championship. Having retired from full-time competition after 2018, the 48-year-old has kept himself in racing shape by making sporadic rally starts. In January 2022, he and son Oliver Solberg won the Race of Champions’ Nations Cup for Team Norway before the older Solberg was defeated in the individual tournament by former WRC rival Sébastien Loeb. Solberg previously won the 2014 Nations Cup alongside Tom Kristensen under the Team Nordic banner.

Loeb has become one of the most notable examples of rally racers entering rally raid. The nine-time World Rally Champion and rallycross veteran has raced at Dakar since 2016 and finished runner-up in the 2022 World Rally-Raid Championship T1 standings. The 2016 Rally was also the first of three for Mikko Hirvonen, who raced against Solberg and Loeb in WRC, and he eventually won that year’s Hungarian Baja. The ongoing 2023 edition is seeing the début of Sergio Vallejo, a two-time Spanish Rally Champion who has variably competed in WRC.

Robbie Pierce, an Off-Road Motorsports Hall of Fame inductee in 2018, passed away after an accident while scuba diving. His Jimco Racing company announced the news on Tuesday. He was 63 years old.

“It is with great sadness that we announce the passing of our great leader, racer, builder, entrepreneur, and Off-Road Motorsports Hall of Fame Inductee, Robbie Pierce,” reads a statement from Jimco. “Robbie died in an accident while scuba diving, his second biggest passion in life.

“His dedication to the safety and advancement of off-road racing and motorsports will continue to save lives, and thrill racers and fans alike for years to come.

“What you do in life echoes in eternity. Drive fast, take chances. Race in Peace.”

Pierce did not get into racing until he was in his forties, but was already involved in motorsport via his businesses. A machinist in his early adulthood, he worked for MasterCraft Safety before buying out the company in 1999; MasterCraft produces racing seats and other related accessories for both pavement and off-road racing, as well as military vehicles. Pierce also owned Impact Racing founded by racing safety pioneer Bill Simpson before selling it and MasterCraft to Sparco in 2017.

American driver Kaylen Frederick will race for ART Grand Prix in his third season in FIA Formula 3, making the move from Hitech Grand Prix where he raced throughout the 2022 season.

Frederick made his Formula 3 debut in 2021 driving for Carlin Buzz racing, where he endured a fairly uneventful season, picking up two points and finishing twenty second in the standings.

He then switched to Carlin for the 2022 season, where after a positive start to the season, Frederick couldn’t capitalise on his momentum and ended the season in seventeenth. 

The twenty year old also participated in two days of post-season testing at Jerez with ART, where he put in an impressive showing, finishing all four sessions inside the top ten, including topping Day one’s afternoon running.

Frederick spoke on what his move to ART Grand Prix means to him, “I am very happy to be joining ART GP for the 2023 FIA F3 season. It’s extremely exciting to be a part of such a prestigious team, and to see what the future holds for our collaboration,