Motorsports Racing News & Blog Articles

Ian James, the Team Manager of the McLaren Formula E Team and the former Team Principal of the Mercedes-EQ Formula E Team, says Nyck de Vries has ‘richly deserved’ his move to the FIA Formula 1 World Championship in 2023.

De Vries raced for Mercedes and took the ABB FIA Formula E World Championship title in the 2020/21 season under James’ leadership, with the Dutchman taking four wins during his time with the team.

The twenty-seven-year-old made his Formula 1 race debut in the 2022 Italian Grand Prix when he stepped in at the last minute to race in place of an ill Alexander Albon at Williams Racing, with de Vries stunning the paddock by bringing home two points with a ninth-place finish. 

This performance, as well as his free practice outings with the Mercedes-AMG Petronas Formula One Team and the Aston Martin Aramco Cognizant Formula 1 Team, opened the eyes of everyone in Formula 1, and he was signed by Scuderia AlphaTauri to replace the BWT Alpine F1 Team-bound Pierre Gasly for the 2023 season.

James says Mercedes had their eye on him early on and were keen to bring him into their line-up, and AlphaTauri have acquired a driver who is not only very quick but also an extremely good team player for 2023.

Sacha Fenestraz’s performances during the 2022 Super Formula championship should be enough for him to open doors into the FIA Formula 1 World Championship, according to Michael Krumm.

Krumm, a multiple champion across different series’ across the globe including Japan, was brought in by Kondo Racing during the 2022 campaign to aid Fenestraz when it came to navigating the language barrier between the Japanese team and the Franco-Argentine driver.

Fenestraz, a former member of the Renault Sport Academy, finished second behind Tomoki Nojiri in the championship, winning once at Sugo and taking three additional podium finishes along the way.

And the German believes that Fenestraz was one of the standout performers across the season and would do well should he be given an opportunity to race in Formula 1 in the future.

“I have been very impressed with his speed, his performance level,” said Krumm to Motorsport.com. “I didn’t expect that we would get such good results from the beginning. 

Lance Stroll has praised the Aston Martin Aramco Cognizant Formula 1 Team engineers for what they were able to do to improve the AMR22 during the 2022 FIA Formula 1 World Championship season, and he hopes they can continue to bring the team closer to the front of the field in 2023.

It was a very difficult start to the 2022 campaign for Aston Martin and they were towards the bottom of the pack in the opening half of the season.  However, results began to come in the second half of the campaign as developments were brought to the car, and they were close to overhauling Alfa Romeo F1 Team ORLEN for sixth in the Constructors’ Championship by the end of the season.

Stroll’s best finish came when he took sixth place in the Singapore Grand Prix as he and team-mate Sebastian Vettel benefitted from the upgraded car, and he hopes the direction the team were heading continues into next season.

“I think we really struggled at the beginning of the year,” Stroll is quoted as saying by Formula1.com.  “I think we were far off the pace at the beginning of the year, but the guys have done a great job improving the car.

“You know, we introduced a new package in… was it Barcelona? That was kind of the beginning of change. And then from there, I think we’ve developed the car a lot throughout the year.

Lando Norris says the whole McLaren F1 Team did not do a good enough job during the 2022 FIA Formula 1 World Championship season, and they should have scored more than just the one podium finish.

Norris was the only driver outside of the top three teams – Oracle Red Bull Racing, Scuderia Ferrari and the Mercedes-AMG Petronas Formula One Team – to stand on the podium in 2022, the British racer doing so in the Emilia Romagna Grand Prix.

However, despite saying that a podium does mean something to both him and the team, doing it only once during the season was just not good enough.

“A podium always means something” said Norris to Motorsport.com. “It means something to me, means something to the team. But one isn’t enough.

“One is like, we got lucky, and all of this stuff. You want to feel like you deserve to be there every time and we deserved to be there for sure. We weren’t quick enough to be there. We were kind of way ahead of where we deserve to be.

Xevi Pulojar believes the McLaren F1 Team and BWT Alpine F1 Team were too far ahead of Alfa Romeo F1 Team ORLEN during the 2022 FIA Formula 1 World Championship season, and even if they had a more reliable car, they would still have finished behind them.

Alfa Romeo had a much-improved 2022 season and finished sixth in the Constructors’ Championship but were a hundred points and four points behind fifth placed McLaren, and a further fourteen points back from Alpine.

The season started promisingly for Alfa Romeo, with Valtteri Bottas scoring points in seven of the first nine races, with Zhou Guanyu scoring twice in the same period.  However, the second half of the season was a very different story, with only four more points being scored, three for Bottas and one for Zhou.

However, reliability and retirements cost Alfa Romeo dearly, with both Bottas and Zhou retiring six times (Bottas was classified in the Hungarian Grand Prix despite retiring late on, as was Zhou in France).  They had more retirements than any other team on the grid.

Pulojar, the Head of Trackside Engineering at Alfa Romeo, said that whilst the pace of the C42-Ferrari was strong, they did not have the car capable of being either Alpine or McLaren in 2022, although they were not helped by their dreadful reliability issues.

Andrea Stella, the new Team Principal of the McLaren F1 Team, wants to continue on the same path as his predecessor Andreas Seidl and continue to help grow the Woking-based team.

Stella will lead the team for the first time into the 2023 FIA Formula 1 World Championship season after Seidl left to join the Sauber Group as their new Chief Executive Officer ahead of their planned merger with Audi Sport in 2026.

The new Team Principal at McLaren hopes to find ‘further opportunities’ that will enable the outfit to make the jump up the field, with the team having aiming to improve on their fifth place finishing from 2022.

“In terms of how we continue for the future, there’s clearly elements of continuation,” Stella is quoted as saying by F1i.com.  “I think we worked very well with Andreas.

“We established some very important directions and we do want to consolidate them.  At the same time, the complexity of Formula 1 leaves the business always open for opportunities.

Mike Krack says the Aston Martin Aramco Cognizant Formula 1 Team are open to Fernando Alonso staying on at the team beyond his time behind the steering wheel in a non-driving role.

The Spaniard will join Aston Martin for the 2023 FIA Formula 1 World Championship season in place of the retiring Sebastian Vettel, with Alonso agreeing a multiple year deal with the Silverstone-based outfit having been offered only a single year deal with the BWT Alpine F1 Team.

This means Alonso will race with Aston Martin until at least the end of the 2024 season, and he will be forty-three-years-old by the time of the final race of the 2024 campaign. 

He is already the most experienced Formula 1 driver in history having overtaken the record of Kimi Räikkönen towards the end of his 2022 campaign, and he is twice a World Champion in the sport, having won back-to-back titles in 2005 and 2006 whilst racing for the Renault F1 Team.

Krack, the Team Principal at Aston Martin, says the early conversations with his new driver have been promising, and even beyond his driving days in Formula 1, Alonso could take up non-driving roles with the team in the future.

Frédéric Vasseur says it was pleasing to see Zhou Guanyu ‘shut up’ a lot of people by scoring a top ten finish on his FIA Formula 1 World Championship debut in the 2022 Bahrain Grand Prix.

Zhou became the first Chinese Formula 1 driver when he joined Alfa Romeo F1 Team ORLEN ahead of the 2022 season, the twenty-three-year-old forming an all-new line-up at the Hinwil-based team alongside Valtteri Bottas, the duo replacing Kimi Räikkönen and Antonio Giovinazzi.

Many critics called Zhou a pay driver ahead of his debut after stepping up from FIA Formula 2, but he put in a strong performance across his debut weekend, scoring a tenth place finish at the Bahrain International Circuit, a result that his outgoing Team Principal Vasseur was delighted to see.

He may have scored only two additional top ten finishes throughout his rookie season, but he was getting much closer to the pace of Bottas in the second half of the season, even outqualifying the veteran Finn in a handful of races.

However, it was the opening race’s performance that stood out for Vasseur, who will now become Team Principal at Scuderia Ferrari in 2023.

The Argentine brother duo of Alejandro and Marcos Patronelli dominated the Quad category when the Dakar Rally ran through their home country in the 2010s. After running their last Dakar in 2016, the two intend to return to the now-Saudi event in 2024.

“The brothers are coming!!! Saudi Arabia 2024,” posted Marcos on Instagram. “Seven years later we’re returning to the toughest rally in the world.”

Marcos, the younger of the two, finished runner-up to in the Quads’ first Dakar in 2009 to Josef Macháček before leading a Ptronelli 1–2 finish in 2010. Although Marcos retired in 2011, Alejandro broke through for back-to-back wins with the latter being yet another top two sweep for the brothers, before Marcos won again in 2013. The two took a hiatus before returning in 2016, where Marcos finished first ahead of Alejandro by one spot again.

With their performances, neither brother has ever finished worse than second. In the seven years since their last entry, Marcos has been a bassist for the punk band Capitán Nightrain. The younger brother has also competed in rockcrawling, racing a UTV at the famed King of the Hammers.

Argentinians have consistently been among the Quad riders at Dakar even after the Rally moved to Saudi Arabia in 2020. Nicolás Cavigliasso won the final South American event in 2019, while Manuel Andújar did so two years later. In 2022, Francisco Moreno finished runner-up to eventual World Rally-Raid Champion Alexandre Giroud.

A lot has changed for Mick Schumacher and his mentor Sebastian Vettel in the past year, but one thing that will remain constant is them running the Race of Champions together as Team Germany.

“It’s great to be back at the Race of Champions and to see all the drivers again,” said Schumacher. “Even better that Sebastian will be competing too, so that Team Germany can hopefully live up to the tradition of fighting for the title in the ROC Nations Cup. I’m really looking forward to driving on ice again, and to spending time and fighting battles with this impressive roster of drivers attending.”

After beginning the 2022 Formula One season on the grid, Schumacher lost his seat at Haas and was picked up by Mercedes as their reserve while Vettel ended his decorated career. Vettel, a four-time World Champion, was Schumacher’s guide throughout his career and a close friend.

The duo first teamed up at Race of Champions in 2019, during which Vettel won the ROC Skills Challenge. When the event resumed three years later in Sweden, they joined forces again but were eliminated by Team USA’s Jimmie Johnson and Colton Herta in the Nations Cup. In the individual tournament, Schumacher was knocked out of the preliminary round by Jamie Chadwick of Britain while Vettel defeated Emma Kimiläinen (Finland), got revenge on Herta, and beat Tom Kristensen (Nordic) before falling to France’s Sébastien Loeb in the final.

Vettel previously won the 2015 ROC. He and Schumacher’s father Michael, who served in Vettel’s position to Mick, won the 2007 through 2012 Nations Cups for Germany.

Pierre Gasly knew it was the right time to move away from Scuderia AlphaTauri and join the BWT Alpine F1 Team for the 2023 FIA Formula 1 World Championship season, with the Frenchman feeling he had hit the ceiling with the Faenza-based team.

Gasly had already been informed that 2023 would be his last season with AlphaTauri, and with the line-up at the sister Oracle Red Bull Racing squad filled up until at least 2024, he knew that he would have to make the decision about where his future lies sooner rather than later.

When Alpine came calling, Gasly was immediately interested in joining the Enstone-based team alongside countryman Esteban Ocon, believing he has a better opportunity to fight for bigger points with them rather than with AlphaTauri. 

Gasly said he was not satisfied about fighting over the minor points paying positions, so to further his career, moving to Alpine was going to be the best opportunity for him.

“I think at the stage of my career, with the experience that I’ve gathered over the last few years, definitely,” Gasly said to GPFans.com.  “It’s definitely the time to move forward, also with the fact that Red Bull is also sealed until the end of 2024.

Yuki Tsunoda feels whoever is fastest at Scuderia AlphaTauri during the 2023 FIA Formula 1 World Championship will become the de facto team leader of the Faenza-based outfit.

Ahead of his third season of his Formula 1 career, twenty-two-year-old Tsunoda will have a brand-new team-mate at AlphaTauri, with Pierre Gasly being replaced by Dutchman Nyck de Vries. 

Gasly was the effective team leader and had been a multiple podium finisher as well as a race winner, but his departure to the BWT Alpine F1 Team means Tsunoda will be the most experienced driver at AlphaTauri.

De Vries may be a former champion in both FIA Formula 2 and the ABB FIA Formula E World Championship, but he only has one start to his name in Formula 1, which came in the 2022 Italian Grand Prix when he was a last-minute replacement for an unwell Alexander Albon at Williams Racing.

Tsunoda knows that the Dutchman is going to be a quick team-mate, and although he is the more experienced of the two, it is going to be whoever is the quicker of the two drivers that ultimately becomes team leader.

Mick Schumacher still believes he has what it takes to become a top driver in the FIA Formula 1 World Championship despite the German losing his seat with the Haas F1 Team at the end of the 2022 season.

The twenty-three-year-old spent two years with Haas but will be replaced by countryman Nico Hülkenberg ahead of the 2023 campaign, with Schumacher also losing his place within the Ferrari Driver Academy.  He scored points on only two occasions during his time with Haas, an eighth-place finish in the British Grand Prix of 2022 and a sixth in the very next race in Austria.

His season, however, was blighted by big crashes in Qualifying for the Saudi Arabian Grand Prix that ruled him out for the rest of the weekend, and during the Monaco Grand Prix where he lost control and crashed into the barriers.

However, it is not all bad news for the German, with Schumacher moving to the Mercedes-AMG Petronas Formula One Team as their reserve driver for 2023.

Despite losing his racing seat, Schumacher has ambitions to return to the cockpit and compete at the very front of the grid, feeling that he can achieve great things should be get another opportunity down the line.

Otmar Szafnauer is excited for the future of the BWT Alpine F1 Team, particularly when they solve the reliability issues that blighted them during the 2022 FIA Formula 1 World Championship season.

Alpine ended fourth in the 2022 championship despite a number of high-profile retirements related to their power unit and ancillary components, with Fernando Alonso taking the brunt of those problems with retirements in Italy, Singapore, Mexico City and Abu Dhabi all being linked to the engine in some way.

At the end of the year, Alpine ended only fourteen points clear of the McLaren F1 Team in the Constructors’ Championship, and Szafnauer, the Team Principal of the Enstone-based team, says 2023 promises to be much better if they can go into the year with a more reliable car.

“I think fourth is probably where we deserve to be,” Szafnauer is quoted as saying by Racer.com. “We should have had a few more points than we do, we had some reliability issues so not really on performance, and I look forward to fixing those next year because they’re allowed to be fixed from a powertrain perspective. You can make those changes.

“We should have a more reliable powertrain next year even though some of the issues we had weren’t really with the powertrain, they were with the ancillary bits. We have to redesign those and fix them.”

Toto Wolff does not believe the Mercedes-AMG Petronas Formula One Team would have solved the issues they had with its W13 during the 2022 FIA Formula 1 World Championship season even if there was not a budget cap in place.

Mercedes had a troubled 2022 season, winning only once across the twenty-two races as they saw their run of eight consecutive Constructors’ Championships come to an end, the team dropping to third behind Oracle Red Bull Racing and Scuderia Ferrari.

Problems began to show themselves up during pre-season testing, with the W13 being affected by ‘porpoising’ throughout the season, with the bouncing it caused down the straights making it a difficult car to drive for both Lewis Hamilton and George Russell.

Mercedes attempted to find solutions throughout the season and were able to lessen the bouncing somewhat, but the problems remained right through to the season-closing Abu Dhabi Grand Prix in November.

And Wolff, the Team Principal of Mercedes, says it would have taken a lot more to get completely on top of the problem and having more of a budget to do so would not have been enough.