Motorsports Racing News & Blog Articles

On the back of an unfortunate retirement last time out in Saudi Arabia, Fernando Alonso is hoping for better luck at this weekend’s returning Australian Grand Prix, the eighteenth of the Spaniard’s Formula 1 career.

Alonso showed excellent pace at the Jeddah Corniche Circuit but was forced into retirement after a sudden reliability issue, had it not been for bad luck Alonso may well be sitting in the top six of the Drivers’ Championship. Looking ahead to this weekend though, Alonso has plenty of experience around the Albert Park Circuit as well as some fond memories, both for good and bad reasons.

Alonso won in Australia back in 2006 but did also have the biggest crash of his career at the venue back in 2016, it was truly a frightening one to watch! The Double World Champion is closing in on joining an exclusive club, should Alonso miraculously finish in the top two, he will join Lewis Hamilton and Sebastian Vettel as the only drivers to have scored over two-thousand points.

Alonso is a fan of the circuit and is very interested to see whether the vast number of track changes will improve the racing or not, as he looks for another strong weekend.

“I like the track and whilst it’s quite difficult to overtake the changes have been made to encourage this, so we’ll see how it all plays out. We deserve to be much higher in the standings after two races. Our car has been good and the performance has also been good over the weekends. Last weekend was a disappointment as we looked comfortable and set for sixth position until we had our retirement.

Jason Plato completes the line-up for BTC Racing in the 2022 British Touring Car Championship (BTCC) season with his retirement also confirmed following one final swansong in the Honda Civic Type R joining Josh Cook and Jade Edwards.

It is a 23rd season for Plato who will aim to finally reach 100 race wins sitting on 97 wins overall and in what was seen by some as the worst kept secret due to Plato testing with BTC Racing as of late, he has put pen to paper to conclude his career with the Steve Dudman ran outfit.

“I have been able to watch BTC Racing from a distance, and I have seen the team go from strength to strength,” said Plato. “I raced against Josh Cook in previous seasons, and I know where the car is good and where it is not. The Honda has been good for many, many years in specific areas on tracks. It really has its strengths.

“I was very impressed on my first day, with what I saw from the team. There are a lot of very clever people there – everybody knows their role; everyone is bringing something to the engineering table we have. I have been fortunate enough, for the majority of my career, to have driven for world-class teams and worked with world-class people. And honestly, after one afternoon with BTC Racing I was genuinely impressed. I am really looking forward to it and there is a definite ambition and motivation there.”

“We’re delighted to welcome Jason to BTC Racing,” said Team Owner Steve Dudman. “Jason has shown what a world-class driver he is throughout his career, and I have always admired him. I believe that in the BTC Honda Civic he can reach his 100th win milestone and everyone at BTC Racing wants to share it with him. Jason is hugely capable of winning races and I’m sure he will be in the championship mix from the start.

The former Production Car World Champion (PWRC) Benito Guerra from Mexico will be returning to the FIA World Rally Championship this season as the Mexican has revealed his WRC2 program.

Guerra who clinched the PWRC title in 2012 will be making a return to the WRC2 class after two years hiatus and he will be starting his 2022 campaign with Croatia Rally on 21-24 April entering in a Skoda Fabia Rally2 Evo together with co-driver Daniel Cue.

The 2022 campaign is not yet fully revealed but he will participate in six or seven rallies, with Croatia, Portugal, Italy, Estonia and Spain to be the confirmed ones.

“We are ready for Croatia and ready for the WRC again now, we need to come back and get back to the pace of the championship, we will be pushing hard for points in Croatia.” Guerra said.

“After that its Portugal, Italy, Estonia – that’s the first time for me – and maybe Finland, but definitely Spain. We are trying to get six or seven rallies, that will be perfect for us to get the maximum points in WRC2.”

The 69th running of the Rallye Sanremo in Italy will be taking place this weekend which feature eighty crews taking part in the world-famous asphalt rally at the Città di Sanremo in the Liguarian coastal part of Italy.

Last year the rally saw a bumper entry of two-hundred crews including a lot of FIA World Rally Championship drivers taking part but for this year it is reduced quite a lot but the rally will promise a good battle in all of the classes.

Beside the local drivers in the second round of the Italian Rally Championship, there are two familiar names entered to take on the rally.

Mads Ostberg and Patrik Parth will be arriving to Italy fresh from a podium finish at the Rally of Nation Guanajuato in Mexico last weekend, the pair will be entering in a Citroen C3 Rally2 for the Movisport SRL team.

The Norwegian dominated last week’s rally in Mexico, winning 13 of the 15 stages run during the event in a Skoda Fabia Rally2 Evo but they missed out the Nations title due to Eyvind Brynildsen’s retirement.

Spire Motorsports‘ NASCAR Camping World Truck Series programme will continue to put its Hendrick Motorsports partnership to use for Thursday’s Martinsville Speedway race. Two days before the event, the team announced Cup Series driver William Byron will be in the #7 Chevrolet Silverado RST for just his second Truck start since dominating the series as a rookie in 2016.

As a member of Kyle Busch Motorsports in 2016, Byron set the Truck Series on fire as he led all drivers in wins with seven. Although he was a championship favourite, he missed the final round due to an engine failure in the penultimate race, though he won the season finale to settle for a fifth-place points finish. Unsurprisingly, he received Rookie of the Year for his campaign.

Five years later, Byron returned to the Trucks for Rackley WAR at Nashville Superspeedway to prepare for the inaugural Cup race there the next day. However, another blown engine relegated him to a thirty-sixth.

The #7 will be sponsored by HendrickCars.com and sport a livery modelled after the late Ricky Hendrick‘s GMAC race cars. The paint scheme is currently used by Byron’s Cup team-mate Kyle Larson, while fellow Hendrick Motorsports driver Alex Bowman also sported the design for his one-off Truck start with Spire at COTA. Bowman was in late contention after a furious charge in overtime before last-lap contact with leaders Kyle Busch and Stewart Friesen sent them wide; he was classified twenty-sixth.

Byron is a three-time Cup winner, most recently at Atlanta in March, and he dominated Sunday’s Richmond race before falling back on older tyres and settling for third. Seven races into the 2022 season, he is fourth in points.

The Stadium Super Trucks‘ tenth season of competition is right around the corner, and a grid of twelve drivers will kick it off in the Acura Grand Prix of Long Beach. Two are brand new to the series, while eight of the ten returning names raced in 2021.

Jerett Brooks and Robby Gordon arrive in Long Beach as defending race winners. Brooks’ win was the second of his career after last topping the podium at Crandon during the inaugural SST season in 2013. Series proprietor Gordon is the only driver with four wins at Long Beach, previously winning in 2014, 2017, and 2019.

Reigning three-time SST champion Matt Brabham, Max Gordon, Bill Hynes, and Robert Stout are full-time drivers from 2021. Brabham, who has three wins at Long Beach, is not running the full 2022 calendar as he pursues the Indy Lights championship but plans to return on off-weekends. Gordon enters his third year of SST competition and is still seeking his first podium; he finished fifth in both 2021 Long Beach events. Hynes is one of the longest tenured drivers in the series with race experience dating back to 2014, and he seeks to build upon a strong run in last year’s first Long Beach race when he dominated much of the event before being caught by the pack and finishing seventh. Stout, who was third in the standings as a rookie with a win in Nashville, placed third in Long Beach Race #1.

Shaun Richardson is technically also a full-timer, though from the opposite side of the Pacific Ocean in the Australian Boost Mobile Super Trucks. Richardson last raced under American SST sanction in 2016 and 2017, with the latter seeing his lone starts outside Australia when he raced at Watkins Glen. The Queensland native was third in Boost Mobile Super Truck points with four podiums, but the series has been shut down for 2022.

After a two-year hiatus, Gavin Harlien is back in a stadium truck. He was a championship contender in three full seasons from 2017 to 2019 as he won nine races, including Long Beach in 2018 en route to a runner-up points finish. Like Harlien, Davey Hamilton Jr. rejoins the series after last racing in 2018, and he will run the full season in the #14.

The last time Harrison Burton was in a NASCAR Camping World Truck Series race, he was wrapping up his lone full season in the division in 2019. Nearly three years later, he will once again return to a truck on 16 April. On Tuesday, David Gilliland Racing announced Burton will drive the #17 Ford F-150 with sponsorship from Hunt Brothers Pizza.

Burton is seven races into his Cup Series rookie season for Wood Brothers Racing. He currently sits nineteenth in points with a best finish of sixteenth at Las Vegas.

The Truck start at Bristol is intended to give him preparation for the Cup race there a day later. Having grown up in pavement racing, dirt is not a discipline that he is particularly familiar with. Burton made his dirt début in the Truck Series at Eldora Speedway in 2017 for Kyle Busch Motorsports, where he finished fifteenth. Another start came during the 2019 season, but he spun and placed thirty-first.

In his only full Truck schedule with KBM, a campaign that followed three years of part-time competition, he finished twelfth in points with seven top fives and eleven top tens but missed the playoffs.

The news comes as a surprise for many as Joey Logano, a fellow Ford driver and defending Bristol Dirt Cup winner, had also announced his plans to race in the Trucks at Bristol. DGR, being the only full-time multi-truck team that races with Ford, seemed like the expected choice for Logano, though he did not specify in his announcement which team he would race for. DGR also poked fun at the speculation with Tuesday’s news by quipping on social media, “Y’all didn’t see this one coming.”

Max Verstappen says it has ‘been a while’ since he last raced in Australia, with the event at Albert Park in Melbourne finally back on the calendar after two years off it due to coronavirus pandemic restrictions in the country.

The Oracle Red Bull Racing driver comes to Australia on the back of his first victory of the season two weeks ago in Saudi Arabia, and he hopes the strong form that he has shown in the opening two races of the year continues into this weekend.

He believes the changes to the layout at Albert Park should help overtaking, and he is hoping his RB18 performs well this weekend and allows him to fight for the victory once more.

“I am really looking forward to racing in Australia again, it’s been a while!” said Verstappen.  “The atmosphere is always so good there too.

“It will be interesting to see the track updates, I think they will make quite a big difference, especially in turn six where the most significant change has happened. There should be more overtaking opportunities now too which is always positive.

Andreas Seidl says this weekend’s Australian Grand Prix will be a significant one as it will be Daniel Ricciardo’s first home race with the McLaren F1 Team, with the race back on the calendar after two years away following restrictions being in place due to COVID-19.

Since Formula 1 last raced in Australia, the Albert Park track has been altered, with considerable changes to the back of the track as well as the widening of some of the turns, and Seidl, the Team Principal of McLaren, eager to see how the 2022 cars handle the circuit.

“The team and I are excited to be back in Australia after a few years, especially with the significance of it being Daniel’s first home race with McLaren,” said Seidl.  

“There have been some significant changes to the track since we last raced here back in 2019, with the widening of the entry to some corners and changing the old chicane to a fast-flowing right hander.

“It will be great to see how the new regulation cars respond to this as it should make for exciting racing and good on-track battles.”

After being forced to cancel the two previous years due to the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic, the Manx Rally at the Isle of Man in United Kingdom is now set to make a return and see rally cars out on the narrow roads on the islands with the event to take place on 13/14 May.

Last week it was confirmed the rally will be held as planned with the registration being opened for the drivers; the team behind the event have worked hard for weeks to get this rally to be hosted.

As the restrictions on the island ceases after 1 April, the rally is set to host a new for 2022 qualifying round of the FIA ERC Celtic Trophy which allows drivers from abroad to take part.

The rally base will be at the TT Grandstand in Douglas and the rally will feature 14 stages which are run over the two days together with a pre-event shakedown on the Friday morning, six of the stages will be run during the darkness.

Some of the classic stages such as Little London, Tholt-e-Will, Druidale and Baldwin will be featured as part of the 100 stage miles over Friday and Saturday.

For the first time since 2019, Daniel Ricciardo will race in front of his home fans this weekend as the Australian Grand Prix makes a welcome return to the Formula 1 calendar after being absent for the past two years due to coronavirus pandemic restrictions.

Ricciardo has not had the best of luck in his home races in the past, with his best result coming in both 2016 and 2018 when he took fourth, although he was disqualified from an excellent second place on his Red Bull Racing debut at Albert Park back in 2014.

Now racing for the McLaren F1 Team, Ricciardo is excited to be racing once more in front of his own fans, and he is keen to experience the updated layout of the Albert Park track for the first time on Friday morning.

“It’s good to be home! I am beyond excited to get back out on track in Melbourne,” said Ricciardo. “Nothing beats a home crowd, and the Australian fans are some of the best in the world.

“I’ve been back in Perth since the Saudi Arabian Grand Prix, and I feel rested, prepared and excited to get stuck into one of my favourite weekends of the year. It will also be great to try out the new layout for myself, particularly the sweeping right hander as it seems fast.”

After two years away due to the Coronavirus Pandemic, Formula 1 finally returns to the Albert Park Circuit this weekend for the first Australian Grand Prix since 2019, where drivers will be met by a new track layout and surface!

It looks set to be an incredible weekend Down Under, with a brand-new track layout hopefully giving drivers more opportunities to overtake, something which the Australian Grand Prix has lacked in the past. As well as a new layout and surface, the circuit will feature a mind-boggling four DRS zones to further increase the chance of more overtaking during the race.

The new layout, as well as the circuit not being used by Formula 1 for two years presents Pirelli with some interesting challenges. The tyre manufacturer have taken an unusual step this weekend by bringing tyres with a bigger gap than normal between the medium and softest compounds. The second hardest compound the C2 will be in use as well as the C3, however instead of the traditional C4 tyre being used, Pirelli have opted for the C5 to also be included in this weekend’s allocation.

It will be the first-time the C5, Pirelli’s softest compound, will be used this season, meaning that teams will have to understand the characteristics of the tyre. At the 2019 Australian Grand Prix, Pirelli’s middle range, the C2, C3 and C4 compounds were used.

As mentioned, the track has undergone significant modifications for the first time since 1996, which is when the venue made it’s Formula 1 debut. In total seven corners have been modified with two completely removed, bringing the total number of turns down to just fourteen and shortening the circuit slightly too in the process.

Haas F1 Team Principal, Günther Steiner, is hoping the team can continue their points run at the Australian Grand Prix, after scoring in both Bahrain and Saudi Arabia, with the goal of seeing both Kevin Magnussen and Mick Schumacher pick up points.

“I think it’s realistic that we can aim for points in every race, at least for the first half of the season and then we will see if teams make big upgrades or if they gain a lot of pace. I’m optimistic that we can keep this form, we just have to try to score points with both cars.”

Steiner believes that the camp has a positive team dynamic and the new driver partnership is working well, with Magnussen able to use his previous experience in the sport to guide Schumacher, who is in his second season of Formula 1.

“I think the relationship between them is pretty good. For Mick, he can have a reference now with Kevin, and Kevin is trying to help Mick with his experience which he got from driving Formula 1 cars for six years in his career. Internally, the team works very well together on both sides of the garage – with engineers and mechanics – it’s a very good atmosphere at the moment.” 

The return of the modified Albert Park Circuit, after two years off the calendar due to the pandemic, coincides with Haas’ 125th Grand Prix entry. The team will reach this milestone at the venue that was the site of Haas’ impressive first-ever race in F1. 

Williams Racing’s Head of Vehicle Performance, Dave Robson, is delighted to see the Australian Grand Prix back this weekend, for the first-time in two years due to the Coronavirus Pandemic.

After a highly disappointing Saudi Arabian Grand Prix, where both Alex Albon and Nicholas Latifi retired, Robson is very happy to be heading back to Australia this weekend. Formula 1 isn’t returning though to the usual Albert Park Circuit layout, drastic changes have been made to the layout for this weekend, in the hope that overtaking is easier. This clearly wasn’t enough, as this weekend will see a whopping four DRS zones around the Albert Park Circuit.

“Racing again in Melbourne is a fantastic indication of a progressive return to pre-pandemic normality. Not being at Albert Park for two years has been a real shame and we are so pleased to be back and sampling the new circuit layout.

“Traditionally, the street circuit nature of Melbourne has made for a fantastic technical and physical challenge for the drivers, but also led to difficulty in overtaking. The revisions to the layout and DRS zones should improve this, potentially making it one of the very best circuits on the Formula One calendar.

With the removal of the old Turn 9/Turn 10, there is one fewer chicane in the layout, but nonetheless, changes of direction at low and high speed still dominate the circuit. Braking stability, kerb riding and car agility therefore remain critical to the car setup. The much faster section between Turn 8 and Turn 11 will alter the trade of downforce and drag, but with driver confidence also at a premium, taking off too much downforce could be detrimental, and we can expect to see all teams experimenting on Friday.“

After a bitterly disappointing Saudi Arabian Grand Prix, Nicholas Latifi and Alex Albon are both looking forward to the returning Australian Grand Prix, at the Albert Park Circuit.

Latifi endured a terrible weekend in Saudi Arabia, which ultimately ended with him in the wall at the final corner during the race. The Williams Racing driver will be hoping for considerably better luck this weekend, as the Canadian sets his eyes on his first-ever Australian Grand Prix.

Despite travelling to the venue in 2020 for what was going to be his first Formula 1 start, this weekend will be the first-time Latifi has raced around the Albert Park Circuit, after the race in 2020 and 2021, was cancelled due to the Coronavirus Pandemic.

Latifi is very excited to finally experience racing in Australia and is feeling optimistic about the track’s new layout.

“I’m really excited to get my first taste of racing at Albert Park. I’ve not yet driven there with Formula One, although I did get to explore the venue in 2020 and I thought Melbourne was an incredible place. The circuit itself looks really fun, so to experience the whole event will be great. The new track changes look promising; I really hope it’ll improve the racing so we’re able to put on an exciting Grand Prix for the fans after they’ve waited for so long.”