Motorsports Racing News & Blog Articles

Lance Stroll hopes the FIA Formula 1 World Championship can put on a good show at the Circuit Paul Ricard this weekend, with the 2022 cars providing better racing compared to their predecessors of recent years.

The Aston Martin Aramco Cognizant F1 Team driver says the host venue of the French Grand Prix is a challenging track to drive, but he believes the ground effect cars of 2022 will offer a much better spectacle at the track than it has done since the venue returned to the calendar.

Stroll, who has failed to better tenth in any race so far in 2022, is hoping to bring home a good result for the team, who will be celebrating their one-hundredth anniversary this weekend.

“Paul Ricard is quite a challenging circuit, with a variety of corners and some long, winding sections towards the end of the lap,” said Stroll.  “The ground-effect cars we have this year appear to be producing better racing, so I hope we can put on a good show for the fans here.

“It is a special event for the team with Aston Martin’s one-hundredth anniversary celebrations, so hopefully we will be able to come away with a good result this weekend.”

Frédéric Vasseur says Alfa Romeo F1 Team ORLEN have the motivation to fight back and score points this weekend in France after two pointless weekends in Great Britain and Austria.

The team have been enjoying a much more fruitful 2022 FIA Formula 1 World Championship season after a few years fighting at the back of the pack, and they currently sit sixth in the Constructors’ Championship heading into the weekend at the Circuit Paul Ricard.

Vasseur, the Team Principal of the Hinwil-based squad, says everyone has been working hard to understand why their performance was not as strong in the past two races and to find a solution to bring both Valtteri Bottas and Zhou Guanyu back into contention for the top ten this weekend.

“We come to France with the motivation to put ourselves back where we belong after two rather difficult back-to-back races in Silverstone and Spielberg,” said Vasseur.

“We did not manage to score any points in these outings, but the team has been working hard to understand the causes of our performance and we are confident we can get back to the level we have been enjoying this season so far.

The 2022 GB3 Championship enters the second half of the season at Circuit de Spa-Francorchamps this weekend (22-24 July), with plenty of stories and an intriguing title battle continuing into the Championship’s annual visit to Belgium.

Last time at Spa

Bart Horsten took his first GB3 pole at Spa in the fourth round of the 2021 season, leading the field for Races 1 and 2 ahead of the Carlin pair of Zak O’Sullivan and Christian Mansell.

Mansell won Race 1 in mixed conditions, with O’Sullivan and Roman Bilinski rounding out the podium.

That trio stayed on the podium for Race 2, with Bilinski taking his first win ahead of O’Sullivan and Mansell, while the reverse-grid Race 3 brought a first GB3 win for Roberto Faria in a triple-podium for Fortec Motorsport, the Brazilian taking top honours ahead of Mikkel Grundtvig and wildcard Hunter Yeany.

Circuit

The 7km Circuit de Spa-Francorchamps is one of the most popular and iconic circuits in the world, and provides a unique challenge for the GB3 grid.

When Nick Sanchez departed B.J. McLeod Motorsports last Wednesday, he explained he was “presented an opportunity that both supports and aligns with my plan for growth and advancement,” and it is “not something I can pass up on”. One week later, that opportunity turned out to be the #48 Chevrolet Camaro of Big Machine Racing Team.

The team confirmed Wednesday that Sanchez will run the NASCAR Xfinity Series races at Bristol Motor Speedway (16 September), Texas Motor Speedway (24 September), Las Vegas Motor Speedway (15 October), and Homestead-Miami Speedway (22 October) in the #48.

“There is so much great young talent at the moment, all vying for an opportunity to show they can get the job done,” said team owner Scott Borchetta. “Nick has had some great results in ARCA this year and when Shane (Martin, Chevrolet Xfinity Series manager) brought us the opportunity to work with Nick, Chevrolet and NASCAR, it made perfect sense for us as we continue to develop our racing program at a very rapid pace.”

Sanchez began 2022 pursuing the ARCA Menards Series championship for Rev Racing while dabbling in the Xfinity Series with BJMM. The latter was initially a seven-race slate, but he only made two starts—a twenty-sixth at Phoenix and twenty-eighth at Charlotte—before leaving the team. In the meantime, he has been in a tight battle with Rev team-mate Rajah Caruth for the ARCA points lead, scoring two wins at Talladega and Kansas but currently trailing by six points.

The 21-year-old finished third in the 2021 ARCA standings with a win at Kansas. Of the four tracks he will run for Big Machine, he only has prior experience at Bristol where he finished eleventh and fourth in the 2020 and 2021 ARCA events, respectively.

Ahead of the French Grand Prix, Mercedes-AMG Petronas F1 Team Principal Toto Wolff said that the last few races have been evidence of the “mammoth effort of the team” to put them back into consistent podium contention. 

Wolff said that Mercedes improved their standing day by day at the Austrian Grand Prix and ended up earning a great result, with Lewis Hamilton in third place and George Russell finishing just behind in fourth.

“Third and fourth in Austria was a satisfying result for the whole team, particularly given the position we were in on Friday evening. The team worked miracles to have two complete race cars ready for the Sprint and Grand Prix. 27 points on Sunday were a good reward for that effort.”

Looking back at the season as a whole, Wolff pointed out the considerable improvement in results between the beginning of the season and recent Grands Prix. He said that the team’s upward trend shows just how much knowledge they’ve gained since the start, and how they’ve been able to harness it. 

“We scored three podiums in the first seven races, and we have now achieved four in the last four. I’m pleased with the momentum we are building, and it reflects the mammoth effort of the team. Our understanding of the W13 is growing with every lap and it’s encouraging to see that reflected in our development and results.”

Valtteri Bottas says the confidence within Alfa Romeo F1 Team ORLEN remains high despite the team missing out on points in the past two races at Silverstone and the Red Bull Ring.

The Finn retired from the British Grand Prix and was only eleventh in Austria, although he fought back to that position after starting from the pit lane following pre-race engine and rear wing changes.

Bottas says the midfield fight in the FIA Formula 1 World Championship in 2022 is again very close, and he knows they will need to maximise their potential if they are to score points for what would be eighth time in twelve races.

“Paul Ricard is a circuit I have quite enjoyed in the past years, having also collected a podium finish here in 2019,” said Bottas.  “It’s not too far from where I live, so it has almost a bit of a home race feeling for me.

“We know we have to keep our confidence high: our target this weekend, just like any other, is to bring home a good result. I was disappointed to finish just outside the points in Spielberg, but the positive was a good recovery from a pitlane start and some good battles.

The Baja España Aragón serves as Spain’s premier rally raid with sanction by the FIA World Cup for Cross-Country Bajas, FIM Bajas World Cup, and Real Federacion Espanola de Automovilismo‘s Spanish Cross-Country Rallyes Championship. Among the field of 165 for the thirty-eighth edition are names ranging from Dakar Rally winners to Extreme E competitors, and newcomers like American motorcycle brand Harley-Davidson in the newly created Trail class. Ninety-two entrants comprise the FIA-sanctioned grid, while 108 are eligible for the RFEDA Trophy.

Spanish Cross-Country Rallyes Championship leaders José Antonio Ramos and Daniel Alonso will face a contingent of outside threats like Nasser Al-Attiyah, who is perhaps the hottest driver in the field as the reigning Dakar champion and a four-time Baja Aragón winner (2008, 2016, 2017, 2021). Overdrive Racing is preparing Al-Attiyah’s Toyota Gazoo Racing Hilux T1+ along with the Hiluxes of Yazeed Al-Rajhi, who is coming off a convincing Italian Baja overall victory, and Italian Baja T3 winner Erik Van Loon. Al-Rajhi is pursuing the #205 T1 of Miroslav Zapletal for the FIA World Cup.

Two weeks removed from the Island X Prix doubleheader, Extreme E will be well represented as Al-Attiyah is joined by Cristina Gutiérrez, Christine GZ, and Catie Munnings. Gutiérrez and GZ return to their home rally, where the former has consistently been the highest-finishing female competitor while the latter last raced in 2019, in the T3 category. Munnings finished forty-fourth overall and sixth in T3 in the 2021 edition but will move to T4 for 2022.

World Rally Championship driver Dani Sordo will once again make the metaphorical jump to rally raid as he runs the Baja Aragón for the first time in T3 for Nasser Racing. He entered the discipline for the first time at the Qatar International Baja in March, where he finished thirteenth overall.

Vanina Ickx, the daughter of the great Jacky Ickx, is entered in the T3 class with G Rally Team, where she is team-mates with Red Bull drivers Gutiérrez and 2022 Dakar T3 stage winner Guillaume de Mevius.

Chicago having the edge over Wisconsin is not a sentence that football fans are used to hearing in recent times, but one that now rings true in the NASCAR Cup Series. With Tuesday’s announcement of a Chicago street circuit joining the 2023 calendar, it will take the early July weekend held by fellow road course Road America, which falls off the premier level schedule after just two years.

“Change is never easy, but change is often the catalyst for improvement,” reads a statement from track president Mike Kertscher that was released Wednesday. “At Road America, we embrace change, and we are consistently improving our facility and events to enhance the experience for everyone. We understand NASCAR’s efforts to improve the sport while introducing it to new fans, and we look forward to welcoming them back to America’s National Park of Speed in the future.”

Road America joined the Cup schedule in 2021 after a decade of hosting the Xfinity Series and last welcoming the top level in 1956. The four-mile Wisconsin road course has been popular among fans as one of the highest attended Xfinity races, and it continued to hold true for Cup with strong crowds in 2021 and 2022.

However, attendance was not enough to save the track from the chopping block. As it stands, the Cup Series visits six road courses (Charlotte Roval, Circuit of the Americas, Indianapolis Motor Speedway, Road America/Chicago, Sonoma Raceway, Watkins Glen International), the most in series history but also viewed by critics as an excess of the track type for the oval-centric championship. The Charlotte Roval, a counterpart to the Charlotte Motor Speedway oval that hosts the Coca-Cola 600, is virtually guaranteed a permanent spot on the slate as the area is home to many NASCAR teams. Sonoma and Watkins Glen are considered legacy road courses as the only such tracks for decades before the recent expansion, while Indianapolis Motor Speedway is a historic venue despite only recently switching from oval to infield road course. Although COTA was added in 2021 like Road America, it is part of an agreement with Texas Motor Speedway to move a points-paying race from the latter, and a COTA removal would simply shift the date back to the much-maligned 1.5-miler.

Despite the loss, NASCAR Senior Vice President of Racing Development & Strategy Ben Kennedy did not rule out the possibility of returning beyond 2023.

Pierre Gasly goes into his home French Grand Prix on the back of a shocking Austrian Grand Prix, where the Frenchman scored zero points for Scuderia AlphaTauri.

Gasly was involved in collisions in both the Sprint race and the main race, with his collision in the Sprint occuring after cutting across Lewis Hamilton, and his collision in the race taking place at Turn Four whilst Sebastian Vettel was attempting a move around the outside.

Gasly labelled Austria as a “weekend to forget”, and is hopeful that the team’s new upgrades will work this weekend.

“Austria turned out to be a weekend to forget, so I am particularly keen to go racing again at Ricard. Qualifying at the Red Bull Ring was okay, we were just outside the top ten on a track we knew would be complicated for us. But after that, the Sprint Races have unfortunately never gone well for us. On Sunday, I had an incident and we didn’t have the performance level we needed to fight, while getting two penalties didn’t help of course.

“But I always prefer to look ahead and I’m hoping things will get much better with the updates we will have on the car this weekend. They are mainly on the aero-side and they should deliver a real step up in performance, so I’m keen to try them out at Ricard, in the hope that they can put us back in the fight for points.”

Rallycross, mixed martial arts, and skateboarding are a trio of action sports with global popularity. While each has its identity, the fanbase overlap is rather considerable as people enjoy watching humans—in a vehicle or not—take flight, hit each other, or pulling off inhuman movements. In 2015, the previous year’s X Games rallycross lites gold medalist Mitchell DeJong told The Checkered Flag in 2015 that the sport’s Supercar class was like a “UFC cage match on wheels”.

On Tuesday, a day before the X Games began in Southern California, Fiume Capital and Juggernaut Capital Partners gained all three they purchased Thrill One Sports & Entertainment from from The Raine Group and Causeway Media Partners for $300 million (€292.8 million). Thrill One owns Nitro Rallycross and Street League Skateboarding, the latter of which was founded by entrepreneur and skateboarder Rob Dyrdek, and Dyrdek himself has become a co-investor in the new leadership alongside Ultimate Fighting Championship president Dana White.

“Our investment approach is predicated on supporting excellent management teams as they build premier businesses in their respective industries,” Fiume CIO David Hirschfeld said in a press release. “Thrill One is the leader in action sports and we are excited to help the company and its management team at this inflection point.”

Juggernaut founder John Shulman added the investment group’s “considerable investment demonstrates our belief that there is much more to come in this category, and we are eager to support Thrill One in its meteoric rise.”

A former professional skater, Dyrdek oversees the Dyrdek Machine venture creation firm which provides support to aspiring entrepreneurs and through which Dyrdek bought into Thrill One. He founded SLS in 2010 and led Superjacket Productions, a media company that since rebranded to Thrill One Media.

The NASCAR Cup Series is racing on a street circuit. Yes, for real.

On Tuesday, NASCAR announced the Chicago Street Race will take place on 1/2 July 2023, marking the Cup Series’ first foray into street racing. Among the speakers at the reveal were NASCAR Senior Vice President of Racing Development & Strategy Ben Kennedy, Chicago Mayor Lori Lightfoot, Chicago Sports Commission director Kara Bachman, and driver Bubba Wallace whose 23XI Racing owner Michael Jordan is a Chicago sports legend.

The idea was conceived in 2021 as NASCAR—led by Kennedy—sought new ways to reach bigger audiences without investing resources into gambling on building permanent tracks. This campaign notably led to the Busch Light Clash taking place inside the Los Angeles Memorial Coliseum in February, while a street course was entertained between NASCAR and the City of Chicago. The Chicago area lost its Chicagoland Speedway race dates to COVID-19 in 2020 before being removed altogether the following year; the street circuit is the third track in the region to host a Cup race, with Soldier Field in 1956 being the first.

“Like the Busch Light Clash at the Coliseum, we seized an incredible opportunity to add an unprecedented element to our schedule and take center stage in the heart of another major metropolitan market,” Kennedy stated. “This is the ideal setting for the first-ever NASCAR Cup Series street race. The NASCAR Cup Series Next Gen cars and the IMSA machines will race along the shores of Lake Michigan in downtown Chicago, marking a truly historic moment for our sport. We are very appreciative of Mayor Lori Lightfoot and her team, along with the entire City of Chicago for working with us to make this concept a reality.”

To “test” the idea, NASCAR and the city created a street course in iRacing that served as the final race for the eNASCAR iRacing Pro Invitational Series, which James Davison won. The real life layout is identical to its iRacing counterpart, being a twelve-turn, 2.2-mile (3.54 km) track that runs along Lake Shore Drive, Michigan Avenue, and Columbus Drive and through Grand Park near Soldier Field.

Mario Isola is expecting this weekend’s French Grand Prix to be held in much warmer conditions to what transpired in 2021, with the event taking place a month later than it did last year.

Rain hit the Circuit Paul Ricard on the Sunday morning of the 2021 event and made for cool conditions during the race, but the weather is set to be more predictable and much hotter this weekend, which will put more strain on Pirelli’s tyres.

Isola, the Motorsport Director, is interested to see how the eighteen-inch tyres fare this weekend when overheating affected their thirteen-inch predecessors, around a track where strategy is expected to be the key to winning or losing.

“This year’s French Grand Prix takes place nearly a month later than it did last year, when it rained on Sunday morning, so it’s fair to expect warmer temperatures,” said Isola.  

“This year’s generation of tyres and compounds is different and more resistant to overheating than the thirteen-inch versions used last year, so we’ll have to see how that affects the strategy.

Dave Robson has been encouraged by the performance of Williams Racing’s FW44 across the past two race weekends in Great Britain and Austria in the hands of Alexander Albon, so he is pleased the upgrades used by the Thai driver in those events will now also be used by his team-mate Nicholas Latifi.

Latifi has been using the older spec car while Albon had the updates, but the Canadian will now be given a level playing field against his team-mate for the first time this weekend at the Circuit Paul Ricard in France, much to the delight of Williams’ Head of Vehicle Performance.

“Having introduced some new parts to Alex’s car over the last couple of races, we are now in a position where both cars can run with the upgrades,” said Robson.  “Although the weather in Silverstone, and the Sprint format in Austria were not ideal for testing, we have seen enough encouraging feedback to be confident that we have taken a step forward.

“With the weather likely to be warm, dry and stable this weekend, we’ll look to use Friday’s running to get Nicky up to speed with the new parts and also to continue to understand how best to exploit the performance of the new package.”

As well as getting the best out of the updates, Robson says it will be key to get on top of Pirelli’s tyres in France, with the sole tyre manufacturer of the FIA Formula 1 World Championship bringing the three tyres in the middle of their range for the event.

Alexander Albon hopes the information Williams Racing have gathered across the past two Grand Prix in Great Britain and Austria will help the team move forward with its upgraded FW44 this weekend in France.

The Thai driver used the updated car for the first time at Silverstone three weeks ago and then again at the Red Bull Ring, and he has seen a step forward in performance with the car in that time, even if results do not yet show that.

Albon hopes the Circuit Paul Ricard proves to be a good opportunity to see just what the car can do, and he is pushing to get his third top ten finish of the 2022 FIA Formula 1 World Championship season on Sunday.

“I’m looking forward to France now that we have Austria under our belt and more information and data available for the team to analyse,” said Albon.  “Hopefully we can keep pushing and working on the car, exploiting its performance and get a good result in France.

“The track is quite a mixed circuit with generally medium to high speed corners, so will be a good opportunity for us to see what the car can do.” 

Joe Graf Jr. will skip a NASCAR Xfinity Series race for the first time since Indianapolis in August 2021 as he backs out of Saturday’s Pocono Raceway event for family reasons. In his place, SS-Green Light Racing has entrusted the #07 Ford Mustang to Cole Custer.

The partnership between Custer and SSGLR began in 2021 as the latter forged a technical alliance with Custer’s Cup Series team Stewart-Haas Racing. Custer, who finished runner-up in the 2018 and 2019 Xfinity championships, has shown out in his sporadic starts for SSGLR with three top tens in four starts and dominating the Fontana race in February for owner Bobby Dotter‘s maiden NASCAR victory.

Custer won the 2019 Pocono Xfinity race from the pole and scored top tens in all three attempts at the Pennsylvania track.

“SS-Green Light Racing with Jeff Lefcourt mainstay driver Joe Graf Jr. will temporarily step out of the #07 Ford Mustang for a private family matter beginning with this weekend’s NASCAR Xfinity Series race at Pocono Raceway,” reads a team statement. “While his absence should be brief, the SS-Green Light Racing with Jeff Lefcourt team is extremely appreciative and thankful for our alliance with Stewart-Haas Racing that will allow Cole Custer to compete in this weekend’s Pocono Mountains 225.”

Graf, now in his third Xfinity season with the team, is twenty-fifth in points with a best race finish of eighth at Talladega. With Custer driving the #07 at Fontana, he was bumped to SSGLR’s #08 and failed to qualify but found a seat for the race in RSS Racing‘s #38, which he piloted to a fifteenth. The run was his first of three top twenties in 2022 to date, followed by the Talladega finish and a twelfth in Saturday’s New Hampshire race. He also drove the #5 for B.J. McLeod Motorsports but retired for brake failure.